(4)

DREAMS IN A BACKWATER:  fragment

(2nd manuscript)

I'm in the cemetery again, sitting under a tree.  I see a woman in the distance, moving in and out of sight as she makes her way round the gravestones, round the bushes and trees . . .  She is a middle-aged woman, dressed casually in a pair of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt, and although the day is overcast she's wearing a pair of sunglasses as well.  She walks with a cane, and a dog, large, long legged, brown, is roaming about ahead of her, leading her on.  There is something in all of this, something in the combination of dark glasses, cane and dog, and in the indeterminateness of the route the woman's taking, that gives an impression of blindness.  At first I think that she and the dog are simply going to pass me by – they're walking some distance from where I sit – but then suddenly the dog turns and begins to slowly wend his way towards me, the woman following after.  They come closer, closer, and sitting there under my tree I find it somehow incredible that out of the whole of this rather large cemetery, out of the entirety of its length and breadth, this woman and her dog should appear to be taking a path that's going to lead them directly to me.  But this, in fact, is precisely what they do.  The dog, nose to the ground, circling round gravestones, mausoleums, bushes and trees, is inexorably making his way to the one spot where I sit.  It cannot be that he smells me:  I had not walked in the direction from which he comes.  Neither does he seem to see me:  not once does he lift up his head.  It's not until he's directly in front of me, no more than three feet away, that he becomes aware of my presence; and even then he seems uncertain about what it is that he's found.  He moves his head back and forth vaguely, eyes unfocused, in the general vicinity of my face; it's as if he senses that something is there, but can't quite figure out what, or even precisely where, it is.  Again I have the impression of a kind of blindness, though the dog appears young and healthy, his eyes unclouded by cataracts.  I hold my hand out to him, palm down, fingers limp, so that he might give me a sniff.  He jerks back violently, as if frightened.  At this point the woman, who is now no more than a dozen feet away, and who I had assumed had noticed me already, gives a little shriek.

"Oh!" she exclaims.  "My!  I didn't know anyone was here!"  I murmur something reassuring about how I'd just come out for a walk and decided to stop awhile to rest and enjoy the day; I even chuckle a little as I speak to show how harmless I am . . .

The woman smiles.  But – "I wonder why he didn't attack you?" she says, referring to the dog.  He's started to wander away again.  "If you'd been standing up and walking around, I could understand it, but . . ."  She gives her head a shake.  "Oh well," she says, chuckling a little herself and starting off after the dog.  "Enjoy your thinking!" she calls; then once again she says, more to herself than to me:  "I just don't understand it.  Why didn't he attack?"  I want to ask why it is that the dog should want to attack me just because I'm sitting instead of standing up, but before I can figure out a polite way of formulating this question, the woman is gone.

It all seems very strange.  Like something out of a dream, I might almost say.

Breathe in, breathe out.  Concentrate on the breath.

I continue to practice this meditation throughout the day, albeit in typically wayward fashion, sometimes forgetting to do it altogether for long periods of time, sometimes stopping on purpose for awhile in order to give myself a break; and yet I find that I keep wanting to come back to it.  I seem to be hungry for its discipline.  Sometimes it feels as if I'm trying to force my thoughts into some unnatural shape, and my mind recoils from the strain; yet the exercise seems to be slowly giving me new strength:  I find that my ability for concentration is gradually increasing, and with it, my sense of relaxation and peace.  Though I must say, this sense of what I call "peace" is not, as I once thought it should be, synonymous with contentment; but neither is it a mere negation of mind and emotion.  Rather, it is a growing ability to be at one with whatever I direct my attention to.  This brings with it a feeling of wholeness; and that, presumably, is what is meant by the sense of "peace" which meditation is supposed to bestow upon its practitioner.  Since I am concentrating my attention on the breath, my focus is physical, located within the body and extending to the senses; this too brings a sense of peacefulness as it is something of a relief to divert attention from the mind and the emotions.  Of course, during my daily activities, and particularly while at work, I'm frequently required to focus on some other activity, e.g. waiting on customers.  But I'm finding that, even then, a quality of suspension from the fraying activities of mind and emotion is being sustained.

The experiential sensation I have is one of being both present within the world and yet separate from it.  But it is difficult to describe what experiential knowledge I gain from this.  I am here, and yet not here, both connected and yet detached; I am the admixture of the subjective and the objective:  reality is a dream:  I exist separately from this dream, and yet I am inextricably intertwined with it as well.  I am a true "outsider," and I am a true Warrior too, or at last beginning to become one, as I learn to move with greater ease between the personas of the Witness and the Seeker.  I discover my context – or rather, discover how to inhabit the context that has long been mine with greater awareness, and hence with greater facility and ease.  I become the Dreamer.

I discover a source of confusion that has, albeit unconsciously, long had me in its grip.  I have long considered art to be in service of life, if only because it is the substance of my own life from which the "art" that I create is made.  But in fact it ought to be the opposite that's true:  it's art which should be given the primary value; for life, I now see, can only be properly understood when it's seen to be at the service of the artist.  This is the way into the realm of the Dream.  To see life as art – or rather, to see life through the eyes of the artist – is to see in the only way in which the objective and the subjective, meaning and meaninglessness, the void and that which manifests from out of the void, etc, intermix in such a way that what is truth and what is a lie do not conflict and do battle with one another.  All is of a piece:  this is what art, and art alone, can accomplish.  As the Artist-Dreamer, I can be both "of" the world yet "not of" it; I can be both "I" and "not-I"; I can be the void made manifest – and yet also be the void.

And yet there remains always this:  I was walking through the woods today when I heard up ahead of me:  "Ba-a-a-a-a!  Ba-a-a-a-a!"  A speckled fawn came leaping towards me from out of the trees.  It stopped about twenty feet away and we stood facing each other, each barring the other's path.  For several long seconds we stared.  I waited, rather tensely, to see if an adult deer might come charging out after it, but none appeared.  Slowly, hesitantly, the fawn stamped one small hoof lightly on the ground – once, and only once.  Slowly I began to lower myself down, trying to draw myself together into a ball in the hopes of making myself appear less threatening, thus allowing the fawn free passage.  But as soon as I began to move it leapt forward, darting to the right of me, then veering off in a wide circle and heading back in the direction from which it had come.  I noticed with dismay that it had not yet learned how to leap over the fallen trees very well.  "With dismay" I say because there was no adult deer in sight, and I worried over the fawn's ability to care for itself on its own.  Perhaps its mother was not far away; probably – hopefully – this was true.  Or perhaps it had got separated from its mother but would find her again later this day, or tomorrow; such separations can't be entirely uncommon occurrences.  On the other hand, perhaps its mother was in a section of woods separated from this one by one or more roads and any number of houses; perhaps its mother had been hit by a car.  It was impossible for me to say.  I could only know what I saw.  Only that, and nothing more.

At work the other day, my boss told me that, while driving through town, he'd seen two cats sitting in the middle of a busy street.  He slowed down to avoid hitting them, but what happened to them afterwards he could not say.  I asked him:  "Do you think they were strays?"  Meaning:  Did they look healthy, well fed, cared for?  He said he had the feeling they belonged to no one.  "They were just two lost souls," he said.