Half-way from Portland to Montana, with a benign misadventure in the Midwest
And after a prolonged send-off of plangent well-wishing and affections, I find myself wending my way down a nameless road, an immense old-growth forest hunched over me as though it were straining to preserve its angle of repose and thus avoid eroding on top of me. I’m driving a moped. It’s raining and the sun is setting, the darkening verdure expanding to edge out the already attenuated light seeping through the canopy. I’m bound for Montana, and I know this in the way one knows about the impending future in dreams, not as occurrences one can foresee by drawing inferences from preceding events, but in that gnostic, intimate way of knowing that always outclasses the empiricism of waking life.
Similarly, I know that I am expected in Montana in an unreasonable amount of time. I can’t be traveling any faster than 25 mph, which bodes poorly for my prospects. Of course, I may as well not concern myself with covering a certain distance (600 miles) within a certain, expedited timescale, for I’ve learned that time and distance are not relative constructs in dream life. There are no referents to anchor either down so that we might subject them to measurement, as though one could plaster mold that stretch of the I-84 along the Columbia Gorge onto an expanse of grey matter and mete out observable milestones, the variform topography accounted for by the alternating plateaus and caries of the synaptic network. Five minutes of dreaming can account for no distance covered, the 10 miles of a daily commute wrought in meticulous detail, or for entire universes traversed, multiple narratives unfolded end-to-end, a journey suggesting the ultimate malleability of spacetime. In dreams, just as I know what I know without any cognitive energy exerted into the usual efforts of knowing, I will make it to the places my narrative is ineluctably taking me without undertaking the usual efforts of traveling. Rather, when the time comes, the scene will break, and I will spawn ex nihilo into the presence of the new there.
At various points, I am joined by a traveling companion I believe to be my wife -- mopeds are not meant for more than one person, but we somehow manage. There is only the occasional passing car and my occasional traveling companion to keep me company. The air mists densely, as though I’m moving through translucent cloud-cover, and my visual range is forcibly constricted to the confines of the road itself by unseen fetters. Somehow, I am immensely calm.
Scene
I have arrived on the shore of a large lake at the western end of which sits a small to mid-size American city. Though I deduce that the town must be situated at some waypoint between Portland and Montana, I know, by means of my acute dreamworld gnosis, that I am in the Midwest. A low-lying mountain range rings the outskirts of the city just as an expansive waterfront park fans out around me to cover the city’s bounds and bookend the visible horizon as it recedes into the lake’s monochrome. The late afternoon sun dapples the deadening leaves of deciduous trees in the park, which has a mesmeric, disorienting effect on a robin struggling to find purchase on a branch.
Stereotypes of embellished post-war Americana abound in this nameless, anachronistic city. Billboards for Boyd’s Coffee, Chevy convertibles, and a regional bank called Hart & Crane, this one featuring the seraphic faces of the eponymous grey-haired founders casting a paternalistic gaze over the downtown core they, or their forbearers, helped to build (slogan: “Join the Fellowship of Growth!”). Kitty corner to this billboard, at a warehouse loading dock, a massive man in Carhartt overalls loads machine-tooled stove-tops onto a semi heading for the eastbound interstate while, across town, at a diner called The Red Crescent, a 30-something shambler leans over the formica countertop, grabs the Bunn coffee decanter adjacent to the sink, stands up on the metal ring surrounding the stool support and, drawing a narrow arc with his right arm, slams the decanter into the countertop with such force that glass shards disperse heterotropically over a 10-foot radius. As though on command from the normalizing forces of ordered society, the air pressure balloons and several layers of atmosphere settle on top of the patrons and employees of The Red Crescent. Due attention so commanded, the man, enthrall to unseen forces he is certain we all contemplate but fail to understand, flashes a half-smile and utters the words, “Non sequimur!” in a buoyant, if matter-of-fact tone.
Similarly, I know that I am expected in Montana in an unreasonable amount of time. I can’t be traveling any faster than 25 mph, which bodes poorly for my prospects. Of course, I may as well not concern myself with covering a certain distance (600 miles) within a certain, expedited timescale, for I’ve learned that time and distance are not relative constructs in dream life. There are no referents to anchor either down so that we might subject them to measurement, as though one could plaster mold that stretch of the I-84 along the Columbia Gorge onto an expanse of grey matter and mete out observable milestones, the variform topography accounted for by the alternating plateaus and caries of the synaptic network. Five minutes of dreaming can account for no distance covered, the 10 miles of a daily commute wrought in meticulous detail, or for entire universes traversed, multiple narratives unfolded end-to-end, a journey suggesting the ultimate malleability of spacetime. In dreams, just as I know what I know without any cognitive energy exerted into the usual efforts of knowing, I will make it to the places my narrative is ineluctably taking me without undertaking the usual efforts of traveling. Rather, when the time comes, the scene will break, and I will spawn ex nihilo into the presence of the new there.
At various points, I am joined by a traveling companion I believe to be my wife -- mopeds are not meant for more than one person, but we somehow manage. There is only the occasional passing car and my occasional traveling companion to keep me company. The air mists densely, as though I’m moving through translucent cloud-cover, and my visual range is forcibly constricted to the confines of the road itself by unseen fetters. Somehow, I am immensely calm.
Scene
I have arrived on the shore of a large lake at the western end of which sits a small to mid-size American city. Though I deduce that the town must be situated at some waypoint between Portland and Montana, I know, by means of my acute dreamworld gnosis, that I am in the Midwest. A low-lying mountain range rings the outskirts of the city just as an expansive waterfront park fans out around me to cover the city’s bounds and bookend the visible horizon as it recedes into the lake’s monochrome. The late afternoon sun dapples the deadening leaves of deciduous trees in the park, which has a mesmeric, disorienting effect on a robin struggling to find purchase on a branch.
Stereotypes of embellished post-war Americana abound in this nameless, anachronistic city. Billboards for Boyd’s Coffee, Chevy convertibles, and a regional bank called Hart & Crane, this one featuring the seraphic faces of the eponymous grey-haired founders casting a paternalistic gaze over the downtown core they, or their forbearers, helped to build (slogan: “Join the Fellowship of Growth!”). Kitty corner to this billboard, at a warehouse loading dock, a massive man in Carhartt overalls loads machine-tooled stove-tops onto a semi heading for the eastbound interstate while, across town, at a diner called The Red Crescent, a 30-something shambler leans over the formica countertop, grabs the Bunn coffee decanter adjacent to the sink, stands up on the metal ring surrounding the stool support and, drawing a narrow arc with his right arm, slams the decanter into the countertop with such force that glass shards disperse heterotropically over a 10-foot radius. As though on command from the normalizing forces of ordered society, the air pressure balloons and several layers of atmosphere settle on top of the patrons and employees of The Red Crescent. Due attention so commanded, the man, enthrall to unseen forces he is certain we all contemplate but fail to understand, flashes a half-smile and utters the words, “Non sequimur!” in a buoyant, if matter-of-fact tone.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete