Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Over the border, the everyday lapse

 by

Christopher Kelen and Carol Archer

University of Macau; Macau and Hong Kong

In dreams foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the

best thing for writing.  Foreignness becomes a fantastic nationality.

– Cixous

            Following that glimmer, a crack.  Into the borderlands, through mazes of the work. Pure land it is that’s self-created.

In my dream at night I climb with the mountain, alone bent to the straight staff I’ve whittled. In my dream the city comes faltering after me, people are running in all directions. I gather them in my cloak. It is an ark of nesting angels, my dream.

***

            When you think about dreams you dream more, remember more.  You are more between worlds.  There are more worlds in you.

            Am I god in these worlds within? Are such worlds full of gods? And if so, whose gods?  Mine that I dream them? Are dreamt worlds, worlds already known? They depend on the world before, behind them.  Do they have life otherwise?  In dreams are we in some story older than us, bigger than us?

A dream is a line, not quite of thought.  Still rolling forward, broken, blurring from focus. The line of a dream is like a plot, a vision of motion.  A storyline.  But not tested.  It unravels the day in its vacuum of action. The day folds it in after. That folding in and out, of self in world and world in self, is a rhythm which makes us, makes us who we are.

            I go through the door. But the glass stops me. I am through. I am stuck. In motion.  Arrested.

Waking sees the logic of its lines as ink on the blank of the unwritten page, the proper writing. Waking binds into a unity all the voices I am, their disagreements. Dreaming is all otherwise, dreaming collects blind turns that are known and couldn't have been.  Dreaming blurs. What we remember from dreams is unconnected scribble, voices lost to sense, voices which leave us wondering which of our selves has misunderstood which other. But whether the waking misunderstands the dreaming self, or whether the opposite is true, whatever mutual incomprehension divides and unites these selves of ours, they remain foreign to each other, uncannily so. The rhythm of crossings, the rhythm of this border between selves is a mystery.  A mystery of daily life, everyone's. Dreaming and waking: both sides distract us. It is the mystery of a door we never remember but go through every day.

***

            To dream is to wish, is to risk, to command again at the expense of certain familiar controls. To fall into these worlds which make themselves, to fall asleep, we are taken by way of an irretrievable moment. A moment of throwing doors open, a coming and going. Once in, there was no world before that. I can only say this now, from here, from the side which waking declares; it hails us as black ink on bright paper. And getting here, how was that?

            You were on a particular track. You lost attention. It dissolves. Faith. We risk the unity of being. Regularly, rhythmically. That risk is the model of devotions. There is a mystery of wishes into which we commend the spirit. Whenever the switch is flicked. Light into dimness. Who can say I throw the switch myself? Everything is thrown.  All accept the sighted blindness of the self. Heraclitus said:

A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his vision is extinguished. Living, he is in contact with the dead when asleep. And with the sleeper, when awake.

Falling asleep is that moment of forgetting from which we measure our lapses. It is the model of all of our failures to come to a beginning. In dreams we only are but we act.  This entry into the unknown is ours and no one else's. This is a unique moment of emergence. Merleau-Ponty writes of this shift:

There is a moment when sleep ‘comes’, settling on this imitation of itself which I  have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses.  It is true that this last link makes waking up a possibility: through these half-open doors things will return or the sleeper will come back into the world... The body's role is to ensure this metamorphosis. It transforms ideas into things and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep.

There is counting ourselves there. Counting breaths. You settle with one wish. Counting higher and higher. Conquest or the rights of a future. Counting the beasts. Up over the hill and there in the grass where the sky takes aim... face up for it – wishing on, falling back... A kind of essence of death is always on the horizon of thinking; more to the point, there is a dream essence not on the horizon but which envelops me from within my waking. Waking we only act, we don't get to star. In dreams we are persona, protagonist, narrator, anonymous.

Falling asleep – now that we mention it – is approached by way of an inverted view which consciousness provides, as a kind of waking: a waking to a strange self, to a half knowledge. We may speak too of falling awake. One never knows whether or where or how one wakes. Witness Po Chü-I 's account:

         On horseback asleep

            It was a long ride, we were still far from the inn;

            My eyelids weighed; for a moment I drowsed.

          Under my right arm still the whip;

          In my left hand the reigns now loose.

          I came back suddenly and would have asked...

            But was told:

          ‘One hundred paces since you fell asleep.’

          The body and soul had swapped for that while;

            What was slow, what was fast, had reversed.

            My horse had taken me through long ages.

            It's true when the wise men say

          'One hundred years: a moment of sleep.'

Falling asleep cannot be remembered. There is something irreversible in this journey, once begun.  Dreaming can be remembered and waking can be remembered.  At least the waking side of waking – I remember what woke me – remains available to the waking mind. This border is the mirror we face in finding irretrievable sources: a dreamtime or any before of ideas. Whose dream is it and who belongs to it? The paradox of the apparent passivity of the dreamer is in her omnipotence: she gets what she wants. Waking sees the lack of logic in this.

***

            The door is a wall.  Is a door. Glass, brick, some poisonous light. Confusion of solidity, abstraction.  On the other side: everything, nothing, more of the same. The unknown but we know. The unknowable.  We wink.  Site of a disappearance.  The free world over there on the other side. The real but it's not. The cave and the shadows; the blinding, the light.

            Once over and the door is gone.  Or I forget to look for it.  Forget I came, I'm here.  Forget it.  I see through the wall.  I see myself knocking. A drift of snow.   See nothing.  See it all.  Down in the narrowing cone of the past the page yellows like the end of a tunnel receding.

A poem buried with a man. The depth of winter. The poem written in   

a death camp.  By one whom the fascists have enslaved, tormented.  Written in the dark because the guards have taken the light.  How many poems like that? In Seventh Eclogue, Miklos Radnoti writes of the moment when sleep comes to the prisoners: ‘In that moment the prison camp starts home’.  He imagines each returning to the place from which the war has taken him. For each man dreaming there is a miracle in which the possibility is realised: that the bombs missed his house, that his family survived, that there is still a homeland to which to return. The poem has to be dug up.  Prised out of the earth in everything.  The frozen earth.  How many poems like that?  How few will ever come to that glory?

***

 The logic of laughter, the logic of dreams: which word is abused in this connection?  Words themselves are abuse, are strings to tie imagination.  A dream is authentic experience, of a world which I myself inhabit, a world inhabiting me.  In dreams we imagine that we are who we are precisely because in dreams we cease deliberately acting. There is no one to impress in dreams, no one but ourselves. But we’re not there either. The audience is only after the event. Except if the dream’s within a dream. A dream of self-consciousness: the exceptional dream.

Yet what can dreams be but acting, but fiction, when they can only refer to, and not participate in, a real world?  It is in this way that dreams model the relationship which exists between ‘real’ worlds and art in general.  Dreams without a waking world to refer to?  What would they be?  Like fiction with no foothold. A waking which dreaming never interrupted, which never paused to take account (but in that way of not accounting which dreams have)? We must imagine madness there. Lying nearly still: in dreams we only are but act; waking, lit into action, we only act but are.

Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven is a study of the hypothetical case of a subject whose dreaming is immediately effected in the external world. Everything he dreams comes true.  As you'd expect bad guys get hold of him and make him dream bad stuff.  It all gets out of hand. Enough said. It’s because we forget the way things happen that stories are worth listening to. Dreaming is where we pick up that technique. A habit. You can watch dogs doing it... coming to that bone as if out of nowhere.  When only yesterday we buried it there.

            Every waking stuck with the shape of us.  It’s never the same thing you forget.  It’s only to go if you come back that counts.

It is the authentic acts of the dreamer which provide an interruption in

the continuous burial of signs, the burial of images: those burials which enable speech.  Speech: the reduction of the incomprehensible to a form of negotiation. All things being equal we say what they are. We go on and on. As if we knew what we were talking about. When it's the talking and its derailments we come from. Talk is the leveler.  Only through talk we imagine the will of heaven.

            History – the official story of us – is like this: deep denial of, even while in, the process of rewriting itself.  Is it the picture of a world in which the waking always run the risk, as Descartes did in the Meditations, of being caught dozing? So waking to a world unlike the one known, and in which selves are no longer themselves? Such is the world that Walter Wanger's 1956 horrorspoof Invasion of the Body Snatchers parodies: a moment's sleep is enough for the alien mind to get hold of you and there goes your soul. Your past, all the past, will have a different meaning then. You look the same, you know everything you knew before but you are not you. You do not feel anything because, in the manner of the dreamer, you are not quite in the world.

            Is it not this scenario with zombies and wraiths, ghosts in their dated paraphernalia? The long dream on a drip of the life-supported?  Where we imagine a loop, an echo? Nothing new where the hands have nothing to make?  Or hands which have yet to hold?  Babies: their coming to the world, to act. How do they dream?  How do they wake? We intuit what we can't remember… Flash forward, flash back. Death's door. What does the mind make of it?

            Is there life in mind’s implosion?  In life's last inch where time upends, folds back?  A whole geography in there of coasts got up and peopled, left. In my big smuggler's coat every meal that I've had.  And the fields folding out under each beast. Theirs are eyes too and the crops they take in, older still in each particular day. Taking in the sun, the rain, in every act more perfect than memory.  Like a break in the skin and the drums get in. Crescendo. Glissando.

Memory makes it fast.  But in there, there’s all the time in the world. We only hear from those who turn back. And if there's something familiar smelling, won't that be something we've learned?  Maybe not the name of the place. But the idea of it.  A little round of rest. Before the world begins again. With or without.  If it doesn't, it does.

***

            Falling and falling and no hands to catch.

It is possible to hover around such a moment (that fall of consciousness), develop a facility for it, a sort of play.  There is a state in which we can retain awareness while allowing the carnival to begin.  True boundarywork we cannot direct.  We are not in. We are as guests or as gate-crashers in our own bodies then. What we understand we have brought from the alien mind whose works are suspended.  Self spectators.  And as spectators we can but be credulous.

This is half-life: the evanescence of all forms of consciousness.  It is as a slippage from which we are constantly about to emerge. This is a state which cannot be maintained. And yet in remaining awake after the loss of volition we see the imagery of our other world. The pictures are formed by everything that forms our waking selves. They allow of no distraction, no naming. Yet they consist of, from the point of view of waking consciousness, nothing but distraction. Short circuit. What we see now is the parade of what's meant unstuck from its means. It goes on like an army of ants into its mountain, through mists in which it loses sight: of its way, of itself, of all that surrounds.

it is from here the text descends into fragments, episodes

                  …there was one convict left when the settlement failed. Left dozing under tree. The beard gets longer and longer.  He comes by some wives.  He forgets his own tongue.  His skin goes dark with being there.  But the bastards find him.  Remind him of everything.  They fix him up with a job. Give him purpose.  No blame.  He helps them.  It's a kind of burial.

The crooked hat, the eyes cast in.  From where do you see him?  From branches over?  From under the skin? Waking or dreaming: Hypnagogue riddles.

***

                  …there's a cave where they took themselves. The seven. The sky itself weighed on them. There is disagreement about their names. There was a persecution. The Emperor was Decius. Condemned them. They fell into last prayers. And they slept.

The cave was sealed. To save the trouble.  Generations pass.  Until the place is needed for a cattle stall.  The Seven wake with a hunger.  And now in the reign of Theodosius they try to buy bread with the old coin, coin with the persecutor's head.

I'm weary later. From the day walking. Flat in the night. I read into sleep where my language begins.  Still coming true the dream is. Stuck in some cruel calculation won't come to its sum.

            Better to dream than to speak dreams waking. Plenty dulls the palate saying plenty. Sleep to dream and wake to play. That’s my wearying chase of tail. In mountains and in mists.

***

            The slamming behind me.  Voice with my name. Calling me from my homes, my many birthplaces. To the sea, to the forest.  On either side of the border a prayer.

***

            I am always returning. I don’t remember that I came. It is as if the man with the uniform lulls me from my wits into his eyes or the bruise on the page.

***

            You want it to be a door. And beyond the oceans till you’re drunk. And burnt. Turned half to weed. Imagine rotting into the ground.  Till you’re one and not.  Or taking flame.  All the kinds of dissolution turn out to be tricks of desire.

***

Behind closed eyes. I lie in a certain way – leaf curled – and hope that they will come. The cast, the others.

***

I make a dream.  And dreaming makes me. I mean to get there unintending.

Only by the effort to pass beyond understanding. Only by discarding the effort. By means of lack of means. Only in this unnaming.  Getting lost in the translation.  Having to guess where words go. Does this place come to me.

***

The sea in its sleep turning and turning.  And waking too. 

            In the other country... we know how things are.  We don't.  We know that the others are wrong.  Know wrongly. We cannot be mistaken in this.

***

Coming to and from my senses. Can't be got back.  This falling from the world. The border passes unofficially. I dissolve. The other journey begins. 

***

            Or I have a knack for that moment. Wings take me where I hang in the rafters. I watch in an alien mind.  Can’t say no. I am about to watch, about to listen. This is my evanescence. In and of a state which cannot be maintained.

Remaining after the loss of volition. In the ground already but with last words to say.  With no means of saying.  I have a view over the rim of the crater.  Price of the privilege? 

Struck off.  Failed at the effort. What does this remind me of?  How does it remind me?  The moment, that moment. Described so gone. In favour of what? Letting go, letting... I give way to the story... telling me.  In which I’m told.

Become foreign in myself. Not knowing what I wish or where to commend. Passive, pursued, possessed of what logic would abandon. Whatever I want shapes off, won’t slough. The best you do is shift sideways, wish to wish till the light takes out wishes. This vigilance betrays itself.  Eternally. Of course.

***

Things are what they are or they aren't. Every thread takes up a colour.  And the morning sun takes up each thread.  Coming from the pure land then, where the murders were all unflinching, survived. Made me. 

It's falling from a sky. And where a sky places.

***

In my world, in the world in me, how many? The mansion setting

and these houses.  I hear the hinges of the light.  The years spun back.  Anchor up. The fulcrum cast in.

Inside and hunting up the key to get out.  Like a burglar double deadlocked in.

***

Sleep approaches us like a man with cheap tickets, wanting something I can’t quite make out.

There is some part of the animal we cannot eat.  The trains derail. When will we know?  The laughter begins.  And the groan of  philosophy?  What but the continuity of failures in the effort at staying awake.

The birds at my funeral singing for me as much as for today.

***

Enkidu dreams those who had been gods and those who had ruled the world now servants in a house of dust.

***

Always wake up rubbing the lamp. Memory shines in that flawless surface.  More sunshine and hazards than I could delay.

Rubbing and rubbing, some fine mist will catch me: a net.

Nothing pours out but the speech I had lost.  Nothing comes on but the day.

***

Following that glimmer, a crack.  Into the borderlands.  Like prayer abandoned to its host.  Took up with the skin.  Which has a way into itself.

Where? There's the Peach Blossom cave. Light at the end where the old ways persist.  The people have forgotten nothing but the world. They live as they lived before they fell out. Whoever discovers them swears not to tell. Cannot find a way back.  But lives in that haunting. Grey with  wandering. Gives a life to finding what won't be returned to. Through hollow lands and hilly lands.

When judgement stops and the light folds forward of its own – or ours, or whose? – accord... then we are on our way unknown.  Where the heart in mind is always headed.  Today as any other.  Now as never before.  As Po Chü-I imagines in his reverie:

            In my dream at night I climb a mountain

            alone with my straight holly staff.

How many crags, how many valleys?

I explored them all, my feet never tired. 

            My step was as strong as ever.

            When the mind goes back

            does the body return to its old state?

            Can the body suffer, while the soul is still strong?

            Are these - soul and body - vanities?

            Which more unreal, dreaming or waking?

            In the day my aged feet totter,

            In the night they power over the hills.

            Day and night divide me into equal parts.

            There I pick up what here I lose.

Thus taking the sense from things, a moment places me, displaces. This place is mine.  Knows me. Responds. I have handholds, ways blind forward. It is my time now. These my familiar signs. No going back.  And there's no leaving. I am tattooed into the quilt still making.  In my folds sung forth a hillside spread. Dry with the wind and the sun cuts. In my many creviced cape the lines grow deeper with each step. The crew of selves crowds on. Knows me.  Responds. To take the things away from sense. The place is mine.  A moment places me, displaces. 

***

I dreamt of awakeness, how sleep wouldn’t come. I dreamt:

There is a magic pillow

better than any flying rug

or lamp to rub for wishes.

A magic pillow

which fits with any bed,

lies under any head.

The vehicle of what you will,

rug out from under will as well.

Every other world lies

unraveling from there,

like and unlike this.

Where you wish

the pillow takes.

What will be

your own crew makes.

Measured from here

the distances, heights.

Forgotten the hunter

whom prey chase from harm.

Suns ripen up alert to the soil.

And if you cannot kick the ball,

feet cannot quite connect

the lamp to rub, the contents

of the day, the rug,

no argument requires.

You go where the pillow

takes. Your mind's

made up to go.

The crowd folds into my cloak, the angels’ ark. Every syllable falls in. Unchallengable authority. Each thing in itself, as it is. And there is nothing but assumption: the clothes of the dream.

***

We are lonely in our multiplicity asleep. We give up our bodies, our way in the world.  Undoing the damage done all day.

***

Dreams are thieving.  They plagiarise. Dream characters as the undead among us.  We would give them our breath to speak their names. But dreams proceed as if by rights. Lull us from causes, effects.

***

Someone is calmly reading a death sentence, declaring a war, or a love. They are parleying in battle. They coo. The lovers are baying for blood, vivid.  In my dream, here we are - I’m on foot and you’re in your bright new sports car... I haven’t the stomach for the encounter.  And when our mutual friend sees me, jogging away, more and more strangely, further and further off, when he asks after me, you say ‘it only looks like him, it isn’t’. There's nothing to escape here. There's nothing here can be escaped. When you're away off I hear you.  In my dream tell me things I can't believe. My colleagues cannibalise me to make the other machines run. I only understand after however. Where does that authority come from?  That beautiful complicity?  Only in words which can’t be heard, only so perfect in a dream.  Only room for two in my shiny new sportscar.

***

First day of the book. Through all the pages everywhere is distance I’m in. Things here that have always been. A forest loud with every breath. A city in footsteps. Each circle shown into, shown out.  But the map is remaking me.  Crossing me. Skin into skin. And deeper.  Everyday starting from scratch again.  And buried my best assumptions.  Something I can’t help thinking resembles me; and isn’t even thought.

***

Ink soaks me and I unfold the little I know. In that peculiar quality of words, however they're lost: that you cannot unsay them. Like oars across the wine, this dipping in, out. I read into sleep where my language begins.  Still coming true the dream is. Stuck in some cruel calculation won't come to its sum.

Do we dream together? Are we dreamt?  Side by side here on this shelf, untouched by the sirens. The dreamer requires this patching from suspended judgement; the exercise of faith in the materials, the legacy, faith in the doubt which casts over these.  This faith-in-doubt of the dreamer: subversion.  Socrates’ ‘wild beast nature that peers out in sleep’. The dreamer likens dissimilar things. Ambivalence is what the state guards against.  The wakeful dog keeps watch.

***

What have I got to believe by now?  Faith by association is what the dreamer has to go on. All points turning. Waking, dreaming. I gather a home. The day will be for making one day. It will be nothing stolen from.  How will I dream that way?

Or this is where I’m to falter? I’m the driven beast. And losing my lines through the field.  Until the clothes of the dream dissolve.