When I asked what she wanted to be happy, she said she wanted to not exist. As someone who cherished her presence, this caused a sorrow I have never known. Attempting to alleviate the severity of her words, I clarified that I was asking about something I could do for her, in that precise moment in time. She wore a warm, contented expression. Her reply? That it was too late to wish she had never existed, but that at the very least she could still wish for death; if I were truly sincere in my succour, I could make that happen.
This was terrifying.
As her soft features retracted in sorrow, I often felt she was fading away, teetering on the brink whatever comes next. In my fear, I was compelled to concoct stories and jokes, just to see a smile briefly illuminate her face, pulling her back to a radiant state I once knew. I wanted to embalm her visage in the only manner I knew how. I returned to my atelier, repeatedly attempting to capture her likeness with brush strokes. My rendering reflected my dreams. Lying next to her, our chemical bond would induce a deep slumber where she made a recurrent appearance. Most of what I recall on those occasions is the narrowing of her eyes amidst a field a freckles, their diminishing sparkle peering through withering lashes. I felt as if I were trying to rescue her should-be smile from its troubled existence. Then, it dawned on me. With my masterwork unfinished, I left the studio. In my determination I told her I had an idea that could liberate her from the life she wished to escape. She looked at me with a mix of surprise and curiosity, yet without a trace of fear.
This too was terrifying.
The plane moved onward from the Tehran airport. It didn't soar through the air but instead travelled along the ground. It pulled from the runway, winding through the crowded streets, stopping at traffic lights, crossing bridges, and navigating tunnels. At one intersection’s pause my window faced a bus, full of shapeless gray faces. As the signal turned, I exchanged a long gaze with the bus driver. He nodded at me knowingly before taking a right-turn. Eventually, during the plane’s long crawl, it came to halt and the engines ceased. An overly made-up but not ugly flight attendant approached me, asking if I was the one bound for Mesr. She mentioned we were very close and that I could disembark now if I so chose, before the plane intended to continue. I got off and found my bags scattered in the sands looking on to a vast desert. The plane disappeared into the dusty expanse.
And there she was, sitting in an open convertible, wearing a fine silk shawl over he head and oversized dark sunglasses. Her wavy, chestnut locks fell through the gaps in her head covering. As I approached, she got out and waited for me. "Why are you so late?" she asked, with her usual brand of anger steeped words. And at the same time she felt oddly calm, as if unaware of the fact that I had been gone for several months, somewhere far away, somewhere very different. Her smile appeared again. I walked towards her, and instead of kissing or hugging, we simply exchanged grins. After all this planning, we arrived. She inquired about where I would place all my bags, then turned to the car's trunk, inspecting it as if seeing it for the first time. It was clearly a tiny boot. Her search was quick and ended in defeat.
Flustered, she said there was no room for the suitcases. “Why do you have so many? This is so unlike you.” Her features began to waver into the typical dreamlike blob of colour and misfocus. I, too, felt flustered, but quickly responded that the bags were of no consequence to me. I long outgrew stuff. Her smile returned, showing the innocent, childlike side that made me want to care for her. We got into the car, and amidst the sputtering startup, she asked if I knew the way from there to Kalut Shahdad. I looked to the horizon, seeing nothing but rolling sand gravel hills, resilient flora, and tiny shapes resembling a cloth-clad shepherd and a heard of alpacas. Perhaps, all roads do lead to the desert.
Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the relationship between consciousness and dreams is one of enchantment, where we do not feel the anxiety of existence due to the limitless possibilities and freedom to experiment. Dreams strip us of our free will, turning us into observers of ourselves, passengers in our own vessels. Our ability to choose within a dream feels somehow distant; we act and watch ourselves act. We might get scared or confused, question and protest… but these are spontaneous occurrences, devoid of the existential anxiety tied to life's decisions and their conflicts with the past or future. In dreams, we are beings freed from our angst. Even the crises we face in dreams fail to invoke a sense of responsibility, of consequence.
Enchantment always seizes a part of our will, just as love does. We are enchanted by our desires if we cannot resist them. If desire overpowers our will, there is no escape from captivity except through the misery and pain of carving a breach between will and desire within our heart of hearts. Otherwise, we must embrace our captivity and surrender to it entirely. We must find satisfaction in the subjugation of our will, accepting that our freedom is extinguished in the face of love. Thus, we may be at ease within enchantment, much like being in a dream.
Once upon a time, she had left her family home and moved in with me, which meant we had to marry, and so we did quickly, without any real pomp, circumstance, or family exchanges of any variety. The only agreement we made was to avoid negotiating with them about our lives. I recall her leaving her workplace for the last time after resigning. I was waiting in the idling car in the street, and as she exited she raised her hands high in the air and, in no point of exaggeration, screamed to the gods. The suffocating existence in her family home had driven her to work, which she hated, just to be out of the house. The suffocating work life she hated drove her back to the family home she unforgivinigly detested. Our life was the escape from the cyclical torment.
Now, she felt life unfolding before her. But it was more than that. We were fully immersed in enchantment with our newfound freedom, feeling victorious over her troubled existence. Yet, was this a true victory? Does enchantment suffocate all that came before? Can enchantment endure within the bounds of absolute freedom? Dread pervades us all. In the absence of preoccupying torment, it is inescapable. Most of us can stem the rising tide, under the best or even the worst of circumstances. For others, it infiltrates, fills our lungs with weighty daggers that cannot defy their pathology to sever each and every hemoglobin.
For months she sat like a child turning her liberty about like a difficult and confusing toy. Her sense that she was free and must do something of consequence drew close and dispelled the enchantment. Burn the candle of your life before the world burns you. The anxiety of existence was returning, emerging through the schism between will and desire. She wanted something but felt no desire for anything. In her absence of purpose, she truly didn't want to exist, and I had no other real solution. I was powerless to do more than to gently take a knife from being pointed at her sternum. She looked at me for a long time without any real emotion. Her supernova was under way even as she clung to me.
The reality of such despair is that does not originate from bad circumstances. It is a far more complex function of nature and nurture, the innate in tandem with everything that came along the way, a series of the truly unfortunate. One’s nurture may even follow the conventional notions of idyllic and still lead to a place of unrelenting pain. A roll of the biochemical dice. Exposure to ideas, particularly those concerning our latent gloom, hold the power alone to potentially undo lifetime of good. Or perhaps it is just magically inexplicable.
We were fully engrossed in editing, laptops open in a kitchen of some oddly communal residence. She burst into the room with a confidence appropriate to her svelte stature and stylish look. “How are you all?,“ she asked in a mirthful, flirtatious tone.
We turned to her. Some of my colleagues were puzzled, but I smiled. It seemed that no one knew her but me. I can't say I knew her well, but I remembered her from a house party that was nearer rather than further in my timeline. We met at the drink table, when she'd turned to me without a hello and suddenly said out of context, “I only drink whisky.” “Try wine,” I'd suggested plainly, not wanting to sound overeager. “No, I only drink whisky,” she'd repeated. I ordered two.
Her face now looked completely different. Less attractive. Yet I had no doubt it was her, and not because she was holding a bottle of whisky.
She raised the bottle and said, “What do you think about us all having a glass together?”
My colleagues attempted to excuse themselves as being busy with finishing the film. She replied that she could help us with our work. They fell silent, and she welcomed that and encouraged them. With circumspection, they accepted the offer of help from this interloping woman.
We all got up and went to a massive, pewter sink. She opened her bottle and poured the whisky out. My colleagues poured other bottles into the sink. Someone added bottles of detergent and bags of fruit. One of them pressed a button and the liquids in the sink slowly mixed, combining their colours and scents. We filled glasses with the witch’s brew. We then moved into a spacious hall painted floor to ceiling black for the screening.
We watched. We took small sips and mumbled in agreement, “The film is charming, the film is lovely.” She was in the film. It dawned on me it was far from lovely. It was true horror. Her horror. The kind of horror that unnerves you, searing into the interior of your eyelids.
She was drinking calmly as she watched. Illuminated in the pale light emitting from the projection, she worse the face of another girl. I can’t keep track of these thousand faces any longer. I feel too old, and too addled.
Astral events have a remarkable if not horrible tendency to happen even if we do not want them to. They create externalities, butterfly effects that extend into dimensions we cannot comprehend. Then suddenly, we experience the unthinkable. Perhaps we were even party to it.
In the end, I came to understand her well, though not perfectly. Our experience will always be our own. People are infinitely complex, their identities wholly unique, and yet also outlined in shades of the same ink. It is impossible to step outside myself to compare our colours accurately. I find myself sated being an accomplice to freedom. Even still, we cannot help those who may wander in and out of our minds.
[INTERLUDE]
In Milan Kundera's novel Identity, Jean-Marc excitedly travels to meet his beloved, Chantal. When he arrives at the hotel she is not in the room, and he goes to the beach to look for her. In his haste, he nearly gets into fatal accident, but fate had other ideas. On arrival at the waterfront he catches sight of Chantal from afar, instantly recognizing her familiar, happiness-inducing frame. He rushes over, calling out and waving, but she pays no notice. When he draws close and sees her face, he finds it one other than Chantal's. It is the face of an old woman, less beautiful than Chantal, looking at him in a manner indicating she does not know who he is. There is a moment of realization that this is, in fact, another woman.
"Mistaking the physical appearance of the beloved for someone else’s,” wrote Kundera, "How often that's happened to him! Always with the same astonishment: does that mean that the difference between her and other women is so minute? How is it possible that he cannot distinguish the form of the being he loves the most, the being he considers to be beyond compare?”
Jean-Marc returned to his room and found Chantal waiting there, her face less beautiful than he could remember and her glance more resentful. She said that she hadn't slept well, but he barely heard her. He felt that the woman he had waved to on the beach had taken her place forever.
That same night, Jean-Marc has a dream that congeals his subconscious. In his dream, he recognizes Chantal from afar. When he approaches, he is certain it is her. Even when he sees another face with her body, he is positive it is her. In his dream, even though her face is different, she is always Chantal. The moment he awakens, he looks for her beside him. She is laying in a trance next to him. Jean-Marc gazes at her face he knows and pronounces her name, as though he wants to summon back her singular identity.
The smallest of details comprise our reality, shape our conscious. Tweak these minutiae, create slight misdirection, and the veneer shatters. Yet consciousness is insistent in pursuing the truth via the senses, intuition, and logic, with the aim of making its way out of the labyrinth. Dreams go even further, bending the laws existence and the world as we have experienced it. Dreams deny the "real” in extant things, and reveal their innate “nonexistence”, as Sartre remarks.
With this experience, Jean-Marc's delusions of Chantal begin to detach and distinguish themselves. It becomes possible for the image of Chantal to persist even after her existence ends. Jean-Marc's fancies of Chantal can grow in number and variety; there can be more than one Chantal. Imagination reconstitutes her image as though it were exclusively the painting of an invented figure. This exercise of artistic freedom can extend to the very principal of individual existence, which could also be painted back into nothing.
Chantal is truly an imaginary figure in a novel, as is our conception of those we would dare to know. Equally so, is Jean-Marc.
I was sitting with her at a café nestled deep in the woods, overlooking a valley that was also covered in woods. At our patio table we were trying to extend bridges of familiarity based on what we knew of each other through Instagram to overcome the awkwardness of a first, pre-arranged meeting. As we she, she appeared and approached us, or at least what was a doppelganger of her. The copy came and greeted her certified self with affection. and greeted me with a restrained friendliness appropriate to an old but now distant acquaintance.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, the doppelganger asked her if she and I were friends. She told herself that we were friends on Instagram, but this was the first time we'd met face to face two face, as it were. The copy looked from herself to me, trying to guess whether this was an ordinary meeting or a date. She was so open about it that she embarrassed us. Exercising unexpected restraint by not inquiring further, the doppelganger excused herself and apologized for intruding. She took another look to gauge our response to her apology and whether we'd ask her to sit with us. We didn’t, and she raised her hand to bid farewell to me in an appropriately reserved manner paired with a wide, contrived grin. The copy then kissed herself goodbye on the cheek, saying she'd see her in a bit and had some things to tell her. It had an air of foreboding importance.
Freud doubts there is a relation between what we think we remember from a dream and what happened in it. Truly, what guarantees that what comes to our minds when we awaken is the same as what we saw when we were asleep? How many of our dreams have been forever lost?
Perhaps consciousness takes rein the moment we awaken and quickly tries to make amends for the egregious slip of consciousness we've undergone. It rapidly creates a story or reorders the scattered events of the dream in a more cohesive form, even if it retains certain stretches of the strange and bizarre.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Walter Benjamin advises those who want to remember their dreams not to eat breakfast or start their day's activities upon awakening. Rather they should enact a ritual or pray, such activities kindles the imagination or otherwise channels the otherworldly. This, Benjamin argues, could help in holding consciousness and the real world at a distance from the events of our slumber, so that one's dreams may reach the memory unsullied.
Yet what if dreams themselves are a memory or a recollection? What if we remember our experiences in our dreams, in a manner liberated from our circumstances and bounded rationality? Like a memory released from conditioning, refusing to join our lucid memory of which we remain in possession, rejecting the prevailing force to fade gently into that good night. Such a memory is only fit for capture, for profundity, when we have healthy distance form our reality during repose, fleeing from us when we return to consciousness and attempt to grab a hold of it.
Then, such a would-be memory might slip away from us entirely. Or it might partly slip away, part of it remaining to whet our appetites. The memory that slips away worries, and yes indeed enchants us, when it suggests that our lives might be something other than what we know, or what we think we know and what we can remember. This suggests that we are comprised of much more than what we merely know about ourselves, and what we can remember. For those with the most fragile of egos, this is an especially enticing prospect. It is a fair contention that writing about your esoteric dreams, thinking that someone may put in the effort to understand them, is one of the most egotistical acts one of us storytellers can perpetrate.
Or perhaps it is the case that dreams aim to play with what's happened: who we've been, and who we wish or fear becoming, with what enchants us, astonishes us, and frightens us, with what we wait for, and what takes us by surprise. In that event, the greatest reveal is nothing but a clouded mind. My life was only sparse with dreams in periods of contentment. This it not a net positive or net negative, it is only net. Then again, it was in his twilight introspection that Jep Gambardella of La Grande Bellezza remarked that dreams may only be a distraction left for those with No Future.
When our dreams meet our waking consciousness, it rips apart what was created, tossing pieces of it here and there. It disappears in a most cunning and absurd manner, while we scramble to gather its snippets of images, sounds, and words. It leaves us to face the never-ending paths we must traverse to remember and maybe even understand our dreams. It is uncanny how similar the paths we all walk are. For all our flowery words and crude attempts to describe these fragmented notions, to capture these fleeting essences, our telling takes on remarkably similar form and tone, unique in particulars or emotional evocation. And this, in my imperfect view, is perfectly fine. Originality for its own sake does not resonate with the deepest parts of what, may in fact be, a very limited human experience.
I arrived at the airport and waited in the cavernous terminal, for something or someone. Everything in it was white: the floor, walls, ceiling, counters, terminals, and the few scattered benches. The whiteness enveloped me, a blinding emptiness filled with possibility and unease.
Oh, right. I was there waiting for my troupe. We were to be the principal entertainment at a nutrition conference in some derivative Midwestern city. As I lingered there, I watched carpenters and painters diligently working on some sort of interior restoration, crafting things from pieces of wood all painted white. Their movements were rhythmic and purposeful, creating order in the blank expanse.
I began noticing small cockroaches swarming the floor. They were very small but starkly apparent against the endless white. Their multitude may have been my dream itself scattering. Still, the presence was a disquieting anomaly in the pristine surroundings.
A group of men and women in official, stately white attire entered the hall. They moved quickly, radiating urgency and tension. One of them called out in a panic, “Is there a poet here?”
I looked at the workers, and the workers looked at me. It appeared I was the only stranger there, but no one replied. The air was thick with anticipation. One of the women repeated the question, “If you please, is there a poet here? If one is present, tell us, we desperately need a poet.”
No one responded. The workers went back to their crafting, and I continued observing them and the roaches swarming beneath the feet of the well-groomed group in official suits.
It seemed to me like the opening of a poem, waiting for words to give it life.
S.L.