There are days when love is not enough, when you need justice, too. Those are the hopeless days when it’s best to hole up in solitude so you don’t hurt or kill anyone you might later regret having hurt or killed. When such days become frequent, it’s time to find wilderness. Wilderness can be inside or outside and is full of dangerous beasts, toxic plants, and hostile terrain either way. Tread lightly near us on such days. We will pounce and slash and bite.
–Samael Gyre, opening of “Nightmare Days On Autumn’s Cusp”
#
This is not a narrative. It is a miscellany of nightmares and thoughts, quotations and observations, fact and fiction. There is no story and the structure is emotional. Find your own way through the dark; my candle’s burnt out.
Night falls, temperatures plunge, and the ice bites. Black dogs circle, only their eyes visible, glowing embers waiting to slip teeth to throat.
You stand your ground and hope the firewood lasts.
–You stand your ground and hope the firewood of writing lasts.
I escaped upstairs for a moment of respite, intending to pee and give my ears a break from party hubbub. At the top of the sweeping curve of staircase I entered the first door, which proved to be a bedroom suite.
On the floor between the king size bed and a changing table set against the wall beside a window lay a baby, face down, swaddled in a blanket like a mummy, face flat on the rug, butt up the way babies will do. Wondering what was going on, if perhaps it had fallen, I knelt and gently turned the baby over. When I saw its face I recoiled; it looked like chicken pocks all over its skin. Surely this was a sick baby. I dared not feel its forehead for a fever but stood and left the room, going downstairs to find the party’s host and ask what was going on.
I did not take the baby with me. I did not even move it to a more comfortable place. I left it on the floor.
Downstairs I searched for the hosts but could not find them and finally asked someone. They said, “Upstairs, I think,” and I went back up the sweeping curve of stairs to find them. At the top I could not resist entering the baby room, as I thought of it, to see if perhaps they were there, to see how the baby was faring.
It now lay on the basinet beside the window, nestled into a jumble of blankets. It was on its back, and gazed up at me without expression. Noticing no one else in the room, I left the baby again and checked the other rooms upstairs.
Finding no one, I went back downstairs and finally found the hostess. I told her what I’d found and she seemed puzzled and concerned. Several other people overheard me; none knew about a baby having been brought to the party.
A group of us went upstairs, me leading the way like a little kid eager to show doubtful parents some little kid wonder. We entered the room and the baby was not visible, neither on the basinet nor on the floor.
I was looking under the bed when a man said, “Oh no,” in a tone that drew everyone’s reluctant, nausea-tinged attention. We saw him at the window, head poked out, gazing down. He backed away from the window and a woman looked out and down, then cried out and began crying.
The basinet was not in front of the window. It stood beside it. To get out the window, the baby had to have been lifted, carried a few feet to the right, thrust out, and dropped quite on purpose.
As I thought this, everyone looked at me. The man who had first put his head out the window had his cell phone out and said, “I gotta call the police.”
My bladder cramped and for a moment I thought I might piss myself. It hurt, and I begged pardon and stepped into the suite’s bathroom to relieve myself.
I heard what they said as I pissed. It made me glance at the bathroom window and for a brief moment consider shimmying out through it, and leaping down two stories onto grass and running off. The police would love that, I knew.
Stepping out after flushing and washing my hands, I said, to no one and everyone, “Whose baby is it?” I had no connection to it, beyond having found it. Surely no one would think I would find a baby and chuck it out a window. Had I done so, why not join the party and act as if nothing had happened? Why draw attention to myself by asking around twice, and raising the alarm?
Emotions ignore evidence and logic.
–Dreams happen during R.E.M. sleep but nightmares can happen at any time during the sleep cycle, which may include what is considered being awake.
Woke up in a theater just as a movie was ending. The credits crawled down in a cascade of huge words above me; I was slouched in the front row, my feet thrust far out since there were no seats in front of me. People rose and shuffled out as dim house lights came on.
Looking to my left and right, I saw no one I knew. Where was my wife and my three sons? Had they already gone to the lobby? Were they waiting for me, perhaps thinking I was reading credits, which I did enjoy doing?
Getting up, I shambled out at the crowd’s tail end. The carpeted hallway disgorged us into a lobby smelling of fresh popcorn layered over stale popcorn. Teenagers in tuxedo tee shirts were busy shutting and cleaning the snack counter. One ran a vacuum cleaner at the far end of a hall.
It was a multiplex, one I did not recognize.
I wandered into the lobby proper, gaze scanning, but failed to spot my family. Stepping into the men’s room hoping to encounter one of my sons, I took a quick leak and rinsed off my hands without luck. Back in the lobby, I wandered aimlessly, figuring they’d know where I’d have to be and come find me. It emptied quickly and I realized I was the only one left who did not work there. Employees cut me odd looks.
Stepping outside, I found it was a chill, humid night, as if it had rained during the movie. Looking around, I saw I was in a mall, and knew it was late because the other stores were long since closed and darkened, crash gates in place. Last show of the night, I thought. Raising my gaze, I scanned the buildings on my limited horizon. I did not recognize any of it. I could not even tell what city I was in.
Slapping my front right pocket, I felt my cell phone. Pulling it out, I activated voice and said Call Wife. It began the call, then glitched out and went dead. I restarted it and looked at the power bars; I had little left. Maybe enough for one brief call.
I decided to text and tapped out a short message and addressed it to my wife and sons on a group address. As I finished it, my phone cut out on me again, this time refusing to reboot. The battery had died. I could do nothing to recharge it.
With no idea where to go or what to do, I tried to think who might be able to help me. Going to the theater, I got back in through one of the doors the manager had not yet locked. He glared at me and said, pointedly, “Sir, we’re closed.”
I smiled and told him, “I’m lost.” Beginning to explain, I saw the look on his face and cut myself short. “Look,” I said. “Can you maybe call the police for me?” Police would help, that was their job; to protect and serve. They’d see me as a confused old man, perhaps a stroke-y geezer in the middle of an episode, but they’d also be able to find my family for me, wouldn’t they? Tracking down my wife and kids would put me right.
“I’d call them myself but my cell phone crapped out on me.”
He looked ready to spit toads at me but thought for a moment and nodded assent, probably thinking that having the cops around wouldn’t hurt at all just then. He stepped into his glass booth and picked up a telephone; calling on company’s dime placed me squarely into business expense categories, in case I started smashing things. Seeing this made me want to smile but I suppressed it. I’m a harmless guy in his fifties who fell asleep at a movie, that’s all, I thought.
It’s funny how what we think doesn’t match what we end up being.
He let me wait inside the air trap between the outer and inner doors and kept an eye on me as he directed his teenaged underlings and escorted them in singles and pairs through the now-locked outer doors. He used one farthest from me and I understood and kept my distance and counsel.
A black-and-white unit — damned cop shows — showed up with a pair of younger men in uniform who waved me to them and wanted to see some ID. I reached for my wallet and found I did not have it, which was not unusual for me, since I rarely needed it in casual situations such as attending a movie with my family. Family outings were communal and usually my wife, who earned far more than I, paid.
They were polite but distanced, a little bored by me. They kept asking what I expected them to be able to do? Finally I said, “Look, I’m without my wallet. Arrest me for vagrancy, maybe, and start what ever process…”
“Dude,” the younger of the two young men said, “about the best we can do is drop you at an emergency room or maybe a church or something.”
Homeless and mentally vague, I thought, that’s what they’ll think at an emergency room. That, or I wandered off from an old folk’s home.
A stab of fear made me wonder if I had.
–The world is fraught with pits and mantraps. Oubliettes abound and many paths lead nowhere good.
Being left behind and trying to catch up is hard on the heart.
I came into Ebensburg on the upslope of High Street from the Munster side, on foot. It was a clear spring day, breezes playing tag, clouds smiling in proud sun. Nothing bothered me, no agenda nipped at my heels. I was walking and enjoying the day, not considering where I’d been or why I was on foot, although I had the impression I was coming back to the town after having been away a good while.
My first indication of anything wrong came about where Hagen’s General Store had once stood. It had collapsed, from the look of it. Farther up the hill, at the crest, on that side of High, the Valley Dairy building was also down. I hurried up the uneven yellow brick sidewalk — that’s no Oz reference, it’s simply factual — wondering if there had been an earthquake, unlikely as that would be. Ebensburg is built on several hills — not a Rome reference, just a fact — in the Allegheny mountains of the Appalachian chain, on the easternmost of the three highest peaks in the region. They stand at just over 3000 feet and run from Ebensburg’s courthouse hill past Anderson’s hill, a near contender, to Munster hill and Cresson mountain. Old route 22, most dangerous road in America at one time, plunges from Cresson summit toward Altoona in the Logan Valley, named after one of the important Indian tribes in the area, the other being the Wopsanonnock, who had a mountain named for them, too, where rattlesnakes and copperheads keep campers snuggly at night.
#
You know how dogs will eat stuff to see if it’s edible and, if they barf, eat it again in case it might be edible? Men are like that about sticking their dicks into things.
Yet she was the vacuum his nature needed to fill — would he grow to abhor her?
— Samael Gyre, “A Grenadine Squire’s Lament”
#
I read and, in reading, write, a part of my mind shifting patterns to fit new correlations.
#
“I’ve never liked quiet houses. They always seem to be waiting for something.”
–Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan, The Drowning Girl, p.101.
#
When I was five I was sitting on the floor in my room playing with Matchbox cars when something lifted me by my neck and shook me. I remember my head bumping the ceiling and then I was dropped to the floor. I landed on my toy cars and it hurt so I cried out and began sobbing. My mother ran up the stairs, alarmed by the thud and my shrieks, only to conclude, as she comforted me, that I had been bouncing on my bed, had hit the ceiling, and had flown to the floor. My insistence that I had been lifted was set aside as a child’s confabulation.
That is how I learned that there are things others refuse to hear no matter how clearly you say them.
They watched me all the time in that room; I felt them. They watched me and I knew I could do nothing about it. They watched me, the things I learned to call Greys many years later. I wrote stories about The Watchers. I remembered watching them in my back yard when we had lived in the orchard house in Altoona. I remember them coming to the window to stare at me inches away on the other side of cold glass.
In my second floor room in the house on Munster Hill, they watched more universally, as if through walls and ceilings, although they did come in once through the windows. My cousins were visiting and they and my sisters in the next room all freaked but I just sat up, saw what they were all screaming about, and sat still. Nothing anyone could do, I knew, and when the adults arrived the grey things left and once again refused to hear what all us kids so clearly told them. Bad dreams, the adults said. Nightmares. A newel post at the end of the bed silhouetted against the window the venetian blinds of which were glowing from the lone streetlight outside. The one next to Route 22. The one mounted on the telephone pole that would be sheered off when a vehicle going well over 90 mph hit it instead of our house as we slept one Sunday morning. I woke to the sound and we went downstairs to find a wooden splinter as long as my forearm piercing the plate glass window in what was to have been our dining room, not a crack radiating it from it.
Another Sunday morning I woke to a smell and knew what it was. I got up and went downstairs. As I descended the stairwell I entered a fog. I had to feel my way through the living room, trying to breathe as little as possible. I went to the gas stove and turned off the main gas valve as my father had taught me. I shut off the one that fed the pilot lights, which had been blown out. The knobs were all cranked full, too.
I opened the kitchen door so the screen door could clear some of the fog, then went upstairs and woke my parents. Both got us kids out of there and opened windows to air out the house. Had I not wakened we would likely have died either of suffocation or, had someone called or had the furnace kicked on and caused a spark, a huge explosion. My parents interrogated us to see which of us kids had been, as they called it, playing with the stove in the night. None of us had.
My father had a haunted look in his eyes. Whether it was relief, the knowledge of what might have happened and how close we’d come, or guilt, I don’t know to this day. I do know he ran out on us for a week once, when I was three. I was about six when this close call happened.
Implications ripple through my life.
#
“Dead people and dead thoughts and supposedly dead moments are never, ever truly dead, and they shape every moment of our lives. We discount them, and that makes them mighty.”
–Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan, The Drowning Girl, p.110, ¶ 4.
#
Petechia; one of those words heard on crime shows that aspire to seem real but are surreal. Petechial hemorrhaging is the standard phrase, referring to capillaries in the eyes burst by over pressure of blood during strangulation. Such phrasing sanitizes the ugly truth of dying desperate for a gasp of air, the piss and shit as bladder and sphincter let go, the galvanic spasms as muscles reach without hands to grasp one last breath that is not there. Then comes talk of the hyoid bone, blood spatter patterns, and loops and whors; reginal scans, ear prints, and facial metrics. It’s all so clean and clear and fake, this realism of jargon. And jargon realism is a sheet over the corpse of our concern and compassion, masking our cold lack of response to the dehumanizing effects of life and death.
#
You have to remember to inhabit yourself or you’ll go wandering again. You’ll go wandering again and be surprised at what changes while you’re gone, if you manage to make it back again.
#
As I was howling for my wives
I met a cat with seven lives
The other two had been used up
By a busy highway and a mastiff pup
I asked him if he’d seen my wives
He told me bees are found in hives
And all that’s sweet’s not always honey
He took my clouds and left me sunny
Back at home my howling stopped
Frustration ceased, my anger stopped
I told my wives about the cat
They smiled and gave my head a pat
#
“It is locked rooms that tell you you’re property or convenience, not equal. No partner has off-limits vaults.”
“You mistake being equal for being one. Equals share only most of themselves, lest they merge with the other and are no longer equal.”
“Secrets, you mean.”
“Without them, or privacy at least, one is not an individual. One is merely property, claimed or unclaimed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does until they do. Unless they do.”
#
Transduction between lovers
Grounded in self
Cross-pllenates
Brief trades of
Tentative contact;
Spit and spirit;
Blood and bone.
Nearer to bliss
Our every kiss
Delivers us.
#
Books gave me what my life’s circumstances could not, so I cherish them. When I prowl books I tour minds and visit people whose voices and thoughts remain alive in their words.
Voice is spirit. Writers should bear this in mind.
#
For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
–Emily Dickinson
#
She basks in my regard
I thrill to hers
Skin the portal
Flesh the link
Touch the world
Love the truth
#
This new day clears the dark night passed. Dark energies move through us like storms. Turns out the dark night was shared by all.
#
Used to fall back on role play, imagined friends, and alternative personalities to cope. When that drops away one is left in the moment, unable to dodge feelings. Direct experience of the world and the self may be a Zen Tao ideal, a stoic virtue, but it is an ordeal when one’s core is unavailable.
Taking action is all one is left with and it is blocked so often, thwarted, stymied by the world, its harshness so insistent, respites rare.
I cannot and will not disengage — haven’t since it hit, this awakening into myself, this epiphany of return, and won’t, regardless. Oh, that word speaks of doubt only about whether, not if.
Self doubts, fears, dreads — all the weaknesses assail me. They hurt but fall away at a the hopeless helpless suffering lodged in nightmarish sleep.
How to be stoic without role playing or other coping tricks is the question. Marcus Aurelius had it naturally, that placid calm; he was also a prig. I live closer to the grounded world and respond more strongly to it. Proximity may trump thought. The world is so close, right up against us all. How devastating a fall through solid rock is life.
Being shut out was peaceful despair while living instead of settling for mere existence hurts worse than anything other than being disengaged and so is sweeter always.
#
Reckless feelings stir.
I want a home. Calm. Touch. Peace.
Is it the grave I’m craving?
#
Where does the positive energy go? Certainty remains but the constraint strengthens. Can’t stand knowing there are only two ways.
#
When I was five my father was a chief petty officer. I called the rank chief confetti officer. When my father heard this he told me it as his job to fire confetti from those big guns on the ship, to make the enemy happy so we wouldn’t have to fight. I’m fifty now and still think that’s a great idea.
#
As my awakening is deepened I am full of inchoate images, words, and sounds. It all wants out but needs form to be real. Feels like stalking prey or prowling for intruders to vanquish, on some level. Other levels sing. That vaulting ambition offers a familiar caress. Or is it sensation in place of intention?
#
Plato is the earliest written record of a near death experience. He wrote of a soldier who awoke on his funeral pyre. His spirit left his body and he met a being of light. He then returned to his body and escaped the flames.
It seems to me escaping the flames is the thing to do, if only we can awaken from this nightmare. How can we shift the sky toward a new dawn?
Yes: How can we shift the sky?
#
Not enough artifice is left.
A poet’s spendthrift words
Ultimately fail.
Thoughts may scatter,
Will, dissolve. One’s
Body melts to bone;
Dust too decays.
Too much entropy kills
Messengers from ruins
Long abandoned.
Not enough artifice is left.
A poet’s desperate echo
Ultimately falls silent.
I am so often left with only words.
#
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with, we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it. — Anais Nin
The good ones do. The bad ones pander and reassure. — Samael Gyre
#
WANTED: ONE LAST NIGHTMARE TO END WITH. INQUIRE WITHIN.
#
spiral rose staircase
nautilus heart
stone circle breathing
caution apart
tender replacement
endocrine surge
possible certainty
opposite merge
dendrite reach excelled
rooted flight expelled
#
When I was five my father one sunny day grabbed his gun, a .22 seven-shot target revolver, and said, “Come on.” We walked out of the house at Munster where we lived beside my paternal grandparents and hiked out of the yard, through the garden, through the narrow passage between the barn and chicken coop, through the Old School’s back lot, which was unpaved and had mounts of dirt I played trucks on all the time, through a field of timothy, down a slope, and into a stand of woods that jutted from a larger forest like penninsula.
As I followed him I wondered if my father meant to shoot me.
I was not afraid but I did wonder. He seemed serious. Something weighed on his mind and his face showed it. He did not say anything as we walked. He did not look back at me either. I could have scampered away but walked along behind him wondering if he had shooting me in mind, unafraid but partly curious. I did not want him to shoot me. That thought made me sad, that he’d give up on me that quickly, or had decided I was simply too much or what ever his reasons might be.
That was the house where the gas leak had happened a bit earlier so now, in retrospect, it crosses my mind that he might have contemplated suicide or murder/suicide. He had run out on us when I was three, unable to face up to fatherhood and being married. Responsibilities wore him down; he took them very seriously. Saw them as burdens, I think.
We found bottles and rusted cans and set them on a fallen log. He shot at them as I stood slightly behind, watching. The terrain was such that the bullets would embed themselves either in the forest floor, trees, or into the ground on the steep upslope behind the targets. He shot away from any houses or roads; this was farm country and undeveloped woodland on rolling hills and mountains in Western Pennsylvania, so such places were not difficult to find.
He asked if I’d like to try and showed me how and let me fire a few bullets. I did well. It was my first time firing a real gun.
Once we had knocked the targets down or shattered them, I asked if we should find and set up some more. He said no and we walked back up the hill and returned home.
That was the first time I wondered if my father might kill me.
In retrospect I wonder now if he had not already tried once with the gas.
Years later, while my wife received military officer training, I was 30 and staying with my first born son, a toddler then, with my parents at their new house in my same home town of Ebensburg. They’d moved from down by the railroad tracks at the “bottom” of town 402 West Triumph Street to the industrial zone residential 600 West Lloyd Street to the top of Bishop Carroll Hill at110 Lincoln Street. That last house overlooked the town, gazing eastward, with only the old resort spa, then a Catholic high school called Bishop Carroll, and environs upslope behind it.
My old dog, Taffy, a chihuahua-dominant mutt, all of 19 or 20 years old by this time, lived mostly in a corner of the kitchen, where she had her bed and toys and a food and water bowl. Mostly blind from cataracts, with diminished smell and hearing, she became querulous at night and whined and moaned for attention. She wanted to know where her pack was; she wanted comforted.
I was sleeping on a futon beside my son’s crib in a small dining room just off the kitchen. When Taffy began crying I would crawl out and sit with her, give her treats, pet her, and otherwise just spend time with her, and she would settle and become secure enough to fall asleep again. Now and then she would wake up and start the cycle over but I was always able to calm her back to sleep, even if it took awhile. She was old, that’s all, and did not like being alone.
One day I came back from being out and about and noticed Taffy was not in her corner. “Where’s Taffy?” I asked my mother, and she told me my father had taken her to the vet to be put down. “She’s suffering,” she added.
I was outraged. I could not believe this. I’d told my father Taffy was just old and wanting attention, not in pain. The moans and cries sounded piteous, yes, but were not prompted by physical discomfort. Had they been I would have found a way to alleviate such pain, but I knew from experience one could soothe her with soft words, companionship, and a treat or two.
Seething, frustrated, and deeply upset, I waited for my father to return and when he did I tried — for about three seconds — to discuss things rationally. I wanted him to know what he had done. And I blurted, “You’re a murderer, that’s all.”
He flushed and walked away stony-faced.
From that point on I would not tolerate being there well at all, and from that night on I began obsessing over the notion that, if he killed Taffy just for being a slight inconvenience, he might come out at night and kill me and maybe my son, too. Sleep went away and I became paranoid that he would kill at least me, if not us, in a fit of violence, his tolerance pushed beyond the limit once more by some inadvertent pressure.
In letters and phone calls I began asking, then begging my wife to get us out of there. We soon joined her for the rest of her training weeks, living in a hotel efficiency apartment. That was the second time I thought my father might kill me.
As I thought over these times, wondering if there were others, I recalled a recurring nightmare I’d had ever since late childhood or early adolescence. In it I am with my father and his father in the basement of my grandparents’ house in Munster. In the dream I watch them kill someone. It terrifies and appalls me. It gets worse when they turn to me and say, “If you tell anyone, you’re next.” I am stricken, and nod agreement, and they force me to say aloud that I understand and agree not to tell anyone.
That is the dream. I cannot recall who it was, or why, or ever how they killed him. I believe it was with blades or a blunt weapon because I don’t recall the report of a gun. I cannot remember if it was a man or woman, adult or child they killed. I can’t imagine why the did it. I can’t think of why they would ever do such a thing. Both were upstanding family men, my grandfather tough enough to have worked his way up to being a conductor on the Pennsylvania Rail Road, my father a mechanic and accountant gentle in dealings with others. Both took responsibility for their actions and lived ethical lives.
As far as I know.
Why such a dream? Had I seen them slaughter or butcher a deer or cow or goat? The homestead at Munster was a farm at one time, which I recall from early childhood. My great grandmother once insufficiently wrung a chicken’s neck, then beheaded it, only to have its body escape her grasp and run an untangled Celtic knot pumping blood. It annoyed her that she’d done it so inexpertly and that the chicken’s body had made such a mess in the yard behind the house’s back steps, which was the main entrance. That did not give me nightmares.
Western Pennsylvania’s mountains is deer hunting country. Once at 600 West Lloyd Street we woke on a Saturday morning to find a deer carcass hanging from the swing eyelet on our back porch. My father’s cousin had put it there, having poached a deer over his license limit. He and my father hung it on a rafter in our basement later that day and skinned it; I watched only a small portion of this process, it sickened me. Later my father came upstairs with blood all over his forearms and chest. We ate venison steak that winter, some with hair still in them.
I am a vegetarian today. No nightmares, though.
At that same haunted house at 600 West Lloyd Street my father killed a bat we found in our basement. We managed to capture it using a broom and coal shovel. We took it outside by the side door and my father made me hold it pinned to the shovel with the sharp end of a tire iron, with which he’d tried to stab it to death. The poor thing bit and writhed and would not die and its defiance of death seemed to click a switch in my father’s head.
I suggested we let it go. He said it would only fly back into the house, a notion I thought absurd. It would surely find a roost elsewhere but I did not argue. I was intimidated by the look in his eyes.
He entered the basement again and returned with a propane blow torch, which he lit. I had to hold the bat while he incinerated it while it was still alive. It was the worst thing I have ever done and it haunts me to this day.
It was murder and I was a murderer’s accomplice.
Am.
Nightmares aren’t what we dream.
Life is the nightmare we wake from when we die. No, rephrase that:
Life is the nightmare we wake from when the parts of the symbiont we call our body cease cooperating to keep the illusion of a single individual going and what we call dying happens, which is simply a separating back into component parts that they can rejoin the larger existence, the All. If our energy is a being, it goes on, or comes back, or dissipates, or finds other nightmares in which to test itself.
Tread lightly. Existence is wilderness. It will pounce and slash and bite.
/// /// ///
(Note: I want mafee instead of burkle but then, don’t we all, really?)
