Crimes of Mars - Beyond the Ruins (10 of 12)

Beyond the Ruins^[1]

 

The Eighth Rhyme of Jean Ami

 

-P-

 

Written in Recollection

Of Having Experienced a Series

Of Psychologically Disturbing Dreams

 

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A river flows out of our sleep,

And randomly it winds

Along a landscape

Of events

 

That has no borderlines

 

And like a snake with silken skin

That slithers through the grass,

 

It coils and darts

Impulsively -

 

Here, slight,

There, wide,

And vast

It has a purpose and a will

That would our passions win,

 

For it would trouble

 

What is fair,

 

With what is foul

 

Within

 

It summons daunting effigies

And speaks of wondrous things

 

That sink beneath

The net of thought

And our best reasoning

 

It gains us by

A scent or sound �"

 

In form, it resonates

 

And, in our wonder,

Rests a while,

 

But as it rests,

It waits

 

Upon our coming to its call,

Upon our sure descent

Into its currents,

There to drift

 

In charmed

Bewilderment

 

This river flows into a pond,

The pond into a lake

 

The lake is like a looking glass

That only God can break

 

A spillway lowers to some ruins

Beneath the waterline,

And there is seen

A silhouette

 

Of wrecks that intertwine

 

Some wrecks are old

And others new,

 

Not one is dull or mean,

For they are things

The soul enshrines

 

Or sins that go

 

Unseen

 

Beyond the ruins, an ocean spreads

Where hopes and passions go,

 

But as we wake,

 

They disappear

 

With all that we would know

 

A river flows out of our sleep,

And like lost Eden’s snake,

It bids us all to follow it

And never more awake[2]

 

It does not

Favor any prey -

 

It strikes

 

Or sallies by

 

And goes unknown

To heart and mind,

 

To faith,

 

And wisest eye.

Thoughts of Camille Du Monde: Entry Ten

 

But dreams cannot be known, not one of them!

 

I once discussed a dream a poet had in his youth, wherein a pig was gained and lost, as well as that lord’s brother. I focused on the things the poet read before he slept, concluding it was that activity that engendered the dream. But others called into question who it was who did the reading -The poet or a different self? Thus, I lost confidence in my argument, as every man has many variations. And no one can say with certainty to what man, or what variation within the man, an activity or dream belongs.

 

Although I regularly think I am the author of a dream, I do not recall an instance when I had complete control over its events �" Some events, yes, but not all. This suggests to me that even though I may be the same person who was a while ago awake, I am still only a participant in the events I see and not their author. I may suspect the events are mine because I see them, and I know that I am me as I awake, but I cannot know if I am the author of those events or the only audience that observes them. Even when I am the lone player in a dream, I cannot be certain that the dream is mine, as I may merely be the only character necessary for another’s telling of the story.

 

In a song I know, a poet speaks of a departed loved one who appears to him in a dream, and yet, he must awake before he recalls that visitor’s death. Who then dreamed the dream? For the waking poet knew his love was dead, while the dreamer knew not this? And oft in dreams there is a de ja vous that rustles in the mind but loses resonance completely in the rush of a day. I once dreamed about a place I loved in my youth, and as I awoke, I felt a strong sense of regret for not having spent more time there. Yet moments later, I came to recognize that there never was that place I loved.^[3]

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[1] “Beyond the Ruins” provides an alternative take on the nature of dreams and dream life. As an intellectual, the poet respected all well-considered viewpoints on a subject and fashioned his own beliefs based on what information he could understand and accept as true. Jean Ami views dreams more negatively than Paris did, and thus, assigns to them a darker, more threatening personality. To Ami, dreams are inscrutable. They may have a spiritual origin, but they are like the elusive phantom in Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm.” To chase them is madness. Although Paris rejected Ami’s argument, he regarded it as “persuasive and possibly true.”

 

 

[2] Paris believed that a confetti bee should take comfort in his dreams because dreams flout the laws of physics and change objects into things that are more symbolic than they are real. They can confuse us because they are so different from what we experience in waking life, but we can adapt to their peculiarity and possibly gain wisdom from them. Still, no one likes to think that his dreams are other-worldly - It’s scary. But dreams may be telling us that we should not be afraid because something better and more enduring than the world of physical objects exists.

 

Here, it may be helpful to know that two radically different dreams inspired Paris’s, “Beyond the Ruins.” Both involved conversations with his mother. The first, already described in “The Foibles of a Dream,” centered on the poet’s amazement in not knowing that his mother was dead at any point during the dream, and how he had to re-enter the realm of the physical world before he recalled her passing. This was not because his waking self was ignorant of her physical demise, but because the concept of death was not understandable to his dream self. Again, Paris considered dreamlife to be part of the spiritual world, and there, death does not exist. In other words, the idea of his mother’s death did not resonate while he was dreaming because he had no working definition of the word death while he was asleep.

 

The second dream was equally epiphanous to him.

 

In it, Paris asked his mother if she thought it was spiritually dangerous for him to contemplate the “existential paradigm” as deeply as he did. Now, bearing in mind that to him, his mother was a possessor of special spiritual authority, he was not asking for her opinion but her imprimatur, and when she gave it, he was astounded by her urgency. He had his whole life observed only resolution in her expression of faith, but in this brief dream, her words cut through him - “Yes, there are dangers, but you live only for the sake of your soul.”

 

[3] The poet believed that the soul has its own will and special ambitions, that it is like a celestial child, mired in a primordial goo. It struggles to express itself and dreamlife is its medium. It floods the mind with metaphors that signify its distress, and it seems ever to be asking: What is going on here? What are you, anyway? “When I am without faith,” Paris said, “I react in mortal fear and seek to silence the insurgent within. But I know that its pacification is predicated upon my embracing the goo that I am. Perhaps, what an individual comes to call himself is destined for nothingness, and only his unknowable soul will return to its Creator.”