Billowing down the levels of psyche til you find your outer shore.
Climbing along treetops and telephone wires, your past hits you right in the face. Bloody nose trickles down your ego and childhood circumstance until you’re knee deep in a treasure chest of toys, painted with old fears and seen through new desires. Your dreams are your reality and there’s nothing stopping you from thinking so.
Scratch to the surface of that faded old photograph. Who are those people and why is there a cauldron of blood between you? Why do their actions need your forgiving, and why must you miss them so much. Some pairs of eyes belong to us and others just swim on by. The mermaids are old, and their scales tattered, as they try not to nod off every night, preventing the theft of your possessions from the chest, deeply rooted in the ocean floor. They’re not getting raises anytime soon, and the pills aren’t keeping them awake as they once did.
So what did you find there? Past that old scratched up photograph and those security blankets? The same belonged to your parents and the same to theirs. My father didn’t know his father as well as I thought he did. His father came to Farrell, Pennsylvania, up from Pittsburgh and just over from Youngstown, Ohio. Worked in the mills and factories. Sent money home to his family in Croatia. His wife lived with him for a time in Farrell, but for the most part he traveled back and forth for months at a time, from being an American to being himself, a Croatian (then Yugoslav). I am made to believe he was a good, honest man, but hard to think he was completely loyal to my father’s mother. The dark one blamed for my eastern looks. Whenever he came back, he’d find my father a little older, a little less scrawny and much more rambunctious. One such return found my grandfather not recognizing my father who had dark brown hair like me, but was born blond. He told him “you were a blond the last time I saw you”. So, the many things he missed flew past, as did the rocks my father threw at the soldiers when scampering across the water, a fatherless creator of his own pathway.
You found a story which told you that your father was not just a provider, or an over protector, and more even than just an adventurous child. He slept on the streets on Christmas Day, he got everywhere on his own accord, and he, like others, got fucked over by our economy, by George Bush the First King. The story will find a cycle and that joyride can take you to the end of the forest, the crux of the desert, the worlds beneath the ocean floor and inside the mind’s eye. Everything reflecting on everything else, as a dream reflects on the water at which a child gazes through her grandmother’s eyes, which held secrets that conquered men’s hearts and informed their decisions, who then dreamed up goals to live and die by. And more dreams each night, all the same, filled with numbers lost in history and families of every universe across these great divides.
Hurt is a strange thing. It feeds on you as long as you feed on it. Hurt, like ego, belongs in a performance. Without the curtain falling and the roses pricking you on your nose as they sail to your feet, you won’t know what to do next. Whirling dervishes also eat supper and bed their wives. Memory is a swing line, low and repulsive which gathers moss and seaweed around the treasure chests of our youth. Time to let the mermaids take their ascent. They need time off too, and it’s time for a tag sale. The contents will always remain; some more so than others. Like the touch of a fabric you will never forget or a smell that is burned into the fire pit of your nostrils, they never leave you. But you have a choice in the arrangement of the show.
They move into dreamtime, which makes me wonder – we can fly in our dreams, soar and experience supernatural occurrences, events and stories. We can have a million faces and experience a million lives, but how does living time affect that of the dream? Could the cave men have dreamed of the automobile and think it a fantastical sleep voyage? Could the Romans have dreamt of the Second World War and thought it a demon or a sickness that was at their constitution? Just because time in the world is progressing, does that mean that time is progressing in the dreaming side of things? As far as dreaming in the ‘other’ world goes?
I wish my father were here to talk about these things with me. I look at the old photograph of him now (and I have dreamed him a dozen times since as I knew him, as he was when I was a child, as he was before I was born or even near gazing a star) and separate my life from his, my choices from his, his choices from himself and see him as a man. As someone I would give anything in this world in order that he could have shared a night staying up late, drinking with you and I. As a great and loyal friend. As a friend I miss very much.
Nazdravlje.
