Category: Blog Post

Surely you’re aware that there are dreams all around you.

You’re moving through them everywhere you go. They’re on every block and corner of the city you live in, and flickering behind the curtains and shades up and down every street. Open the Yellow Pages of your local phone book –what is that if not a catalog of dreams?

And beyond or behind all of those dreams just blooming or being born are millions –tens of millions– of dreams that have not yet been recognized or realized, and dreams that are withering from neglect.

It boggles the mind how many things the human heart can invest itself in or wish for, the myriad directions in which it can be cast by hope (so seemingly arbitrary, so heedless, so often ridiculous).

How can the world contain so much longing? And how can any of us live surrounded by so much disappointment? How can we all be so blind and careless with our attention?

How many dreams might be salvaged if each of us spent a little more time thinking about how and where we were going to spend our money? Or even if we made the slightest effort to be more curious about the cities and neighborhoods we live in? If we would just poke around a little bit and notice all the little, sometimes out-of-the-way places that represent such brave investments, such modest dreams?

Because so many of those dreams can only be fully realized when they are embraced by others, when they are finally seen and recognized and nurtured by the attention of strangers.

In this moment my body wants to evacuate my skin, rattle its bones, and, dancing, dream itself free. Or dreaming, dance itself free.

But my mind swings so wildly, and in this moment –a moment later– I feel like I am blindfolded, with a broken broomstick in my hands, flailing at a cement pinata.

Meanwhile, everything is huddled out there in the darkness, waiting for the truth. And terrified, of course, that it will be the awful truth.

It’s odd how the moon just disappears.

It’s not funny at all, really, how the night moves.

(Sits for a time, jangling his restless legs and staring numbly out the window at nothing in particular. Eventually is seized by a burst of what passes for inspiration at five o’clock in the morning.)

Allen’s appetite appeased, another appetizer appeared.

An apple almost appears arbitrary.

Aboard an aeroplane, accordianists amused an audience, almost all All-American acrobats and affirmative action adherents.

Ask anyone about Arnold; all agree.

At an art affair, Ashleigh acquired an admirer –an artist, actually, and athletic.

Acquiring acres as an accomplishment? Alas, all across America.

Nice try, but I can’t take that idea [sic] any further.

One last dubious revelation before I shut down this third-rate carnival: the best fishing is when you recognize that you’re both the fisherman and the fish.

Right now I just feel fished for.

To be a good man.

To do no harm.

To see clearly.

To do my laundry.

To keep an open heart and mind.

To acknowledge my blessings, to share them.

To eat something.

To give away happiness even when I have little or none to spare.

To feel the pain of others.

To laugh at myself.

To turn down this racket.

To reach out.

To find the courage of my convictions.

To find an ottoman at a thrift store.

To recognize and speak the truth.

To be gentle.

To be fearless.

To allow myself to be known.

To clean the dog vomit out of the backseat of my car.

To listen.

To hear.

To forgive, and beg forgiveness.

To wake up and smell the coffee.

To call my mother.

To hope.

To dream.

To fucking sleep.

To believe in all the big, clumsy, impossible things.

To be merciful.

To be compassionate.

To either find the fingernail clipper or walk to Walgreen’s and buy a new one.

While I’m there to also buy some red licorice and a box of crayons.

To bite my tongue when to do so will spare someone pain or embarrassment.

To express gratitude.

To see beauty.

To pause, to wonder.

To take out the garbage.

To praise, to glorify.

To be whole.

To be holy.

To sacrifice, compromise, and comfort.

To finally go see fucking Brokeback Mountain, even if I have to go alone.

To reconsider.

To think carefully.

To change my mind.

To be a part.

To belong.

To drive like a bat out of hell.

To spend less time on the floor.

To alphabetize my record collection.

To love.

To be beloved.

We asked the captain what course

of action he proposed to take toward

a beast so large, terrifying, and

unpredictable. He hesitated to

answer, and then said judiciously:

“I think I shall praise it.”

—Robert Hass, from Praise

 

 

From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even further away than that. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could possibly not even be a piano you were hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination, or just some of the loose and jangling noise of the world. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes.

He went through the front room and into a hallway heavy with shadows. The place was sealed up tight, and only an occasional angle of light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust. There was blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial patch of it, cooled to the black edge of maroon, and become almost chalk, or tempera powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door.

From the kitchen window he could see out into the backyard, where there was an empty doghouse, and there he found his piano: a clunky set of windchimes swaying slowly from a clothesline pole.

At the end of town there were ruins of an ancient fort, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southermost end overlooking the water was a large terrace, completely exposed to the stars and sky.

He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fort, and through the labyrinths of the fort to the terrace above the ocean. It was a wonderful place for silence; whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed and amplified. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a great well.

The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He saw blazing cruiseships creeping along the distant horizon, and, exhausted and splayed on his back, watched stars crashing again and again into the ocean.

 

 

—Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953

–Zellar, Basement Window, 2005

Monsieur Centrine was a fierce proponent of impossibility. That’s not to say he was one of these characters who will insist that anything is possible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mssr. Centrine believed that life, the world, and every aspiration of the human heart represented a thoroughly impossible proposition.

From this belief he could not, and would not, be swayed by anything in the way of evidence to the contrary. Achievement or accomplishment that appeared to clearly refute his insistence on the thorough impossibility of everything was dismissed with a growl and wave of his fat hand.

Mssr. Centrine would not even grant such incidents –and he was routinely presented with many such incidents– the status of aberration, and he had no tolerance for the notion of miracles. No, Centrine chose instead to entirely deny the reality of the possible in any of its manifestations.

“That is quite simply impossible!” he would say. “It is inconceivable!”

Despite this stubborn embrace of what would seem to be a paralyzing idea, Mssr. Centrine was a man of considerable intelligence, immodest talent, and wide-ranging accomplishment. Presented with proposals that were easily within the range of his abilities, he would, without fail, offer one of his usual exclamations: “Never! I won’t even consider the idea! It can’t be done!” And then, inevitably, he would proceed to do whatever it was that had been asked of him, and to do it well.

Whenever he had succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of the very things he had proclaimed impossible, Mssr. Centrine would of course decline all praise and congratulations by protesting that what he had just done was, in fact, quite impossible.

Over time Centrine’s perverse world view permeated the thinking of many of those who were closest to him, to the point where there were some who began to regard the man as a sort of miracle worker or magician. Such, apparently, was the persuasive conviction of Mssr. Centrine.

Eventually, however, something appeared to shift in the man’s attitude, or perhaps it was a sort of evolution in his way of thinking about the question of impossibility. It seemed to some observers that Mssr. Centrine’s denials of the widest range of the possible became more reckless and extreme. Many of the things he now pronounced as impossible were, in fact, quite clearly impossible, and yet he would nonetheless attack these challenges with the odd determination of the possessed.

It was almost as if Centrine had come to believe the claims of his small legion of admirers, and that he had somehow become convinced that he alone was equipped to conquer all manner of impossibility. For a time he succeeded in many spectacular and seemingly impossible endeavors.

In the end, however, it was a challenge of a more prosaic sort that ultimately did in Mssr. Centrine.

While strolling one day with a small group of his followers, Centrine had paused for a moment to survey the intersection of a quiet and absolutely ordinary street.

“This street is utterly impassable!” he pronounced. “One cannot possibly hope to make it to the other side. It is impossible!”

And with that he plunged blindly from the curb out into the crosswalk and was immediately struck down by a garbage truck as it came hurtling around the corner.

—Mark Rothko, Black on Gray, 1969

–Zellar, Carpet, Shadows, 2006