december is not

I dreamt I was teaching English, and I posed a question that did not remain with me when I woke up; but the answer, collectively arrived at by the students and me, was “Dropping elephants onto houses from helicopters flying at low altitudes.”

canal water flows;
where does it think it’s going,
lit by brown sunlight?

I have begun to understand German language TV commercials and now find them almost as annoying as English language ones. Ka has the TV on in the bedroom now. We are lying in bed and she is looking for something to watch. On this channel, someone is in nature, surrounded by green. It is Peer Gynt. "Nach einem Theaterstück von Henrik Ibsen."

At the moment I'm particularly fond of Gnarls Barkley and have been watching their videos on the web about twice a day.

Today is Wednesday. Tomorrow will probably be Thursday. After that, unless something unusual happens, Friday will come, unstoppable, a pile driver, a juggernaut, like death, like birth.

Peer Gynt just left his mom sitting on top of the house. This is beautifully photographed in windy summer with grain and flowers waving in the wind. The sky was momentarily green: Peer squinting up at it having mystical experiences. Some other young people are teasing Peer from the other side of a chain link fence. Now they are beating up on him. A bald man appears that only he can see.

I was reading about Thomas Calloway today on the web, the singer of Gnarls Barkley. His songs make a lot of sense in light of his personal history. I haven't written anything as good as his songs "Crazy" or "Smiley faces." Which is OK.

Peer Gynt seems to have stolen a boat and a bride. In the next scene, she's topless and they're drinking champagne. She has lovely red hair. He has a tattoo on his shoulder. She's saying he's crazy because he keeps talking about the devil. Suddenly he plunges into the tall grass and gets back into the boat. He whoops with the feigned joy of a talented actor. The sun shines through the trees, not acting. The sky is white and blue. Geese fly and honk. Lying on the grass next to her, the redhead says to Peer's mom: "Tell me about him. Everything."

I was thinking this morning as I was riding to work that I would write something if I were not riding to work. I was buzzed by the first rush of caffeine, one and a half cups of coffee, the mind riding atop the body like a monkey riding atop the head of a mountain sheep. I was wanting to write about something that I only think about as I ride to work. Certainly tomorrow morning I will remember what it is again. But I will not write it down because I will be riding on the 12A bus.

OK, I remember it now. It was about one of the bus stops. I get off at the bus stop called Siebenbrunnengasse, Seven Springs Avenue, but the one that perplexes me is the bus stop called Am Hundsturm, which I think means "At the Dog Tower." There is no tower visible there, only apartment buildings and shops. I wonder why the place is called At the Dog Tower. It wasn't even that I really wanted to write anything about it. I'm not sure what I would say about it. What would one say about something like that? I'm not sure why I write. I rarely do it anymore. I'm not sure if that's true or not. The other night I was thinking about writing as throwing a dust of words over the landscape. Now I think it's also a way to tame things; to get a kind of control over things. If I can describe them, if I can pin them down, they can't hurt me. Of course that is an illusion. But it probably helps to think things through.

Ka is asleep now and Peer is being tormented by some possibly supernatural people inside a barge. Now he's hearing a disembodied voice and screaming back at it. Ka just woke up from the noise and turned the TV off with the remote. The screen is blue, I have to get up and turn off the set myself.

Back in the captain's chair, from which I pilot this universe into ever more complex uncharted waters. Sometimes I dream of a settlement built on the water, always a little different, I ride across it on boats. Now, deep in the night, cars are driving by on the Gürtel, the beltway road around downtown Vienna. Perhaps the drivers are thinking of other things, living in their own worlds while driving in this one, remembering riding on their fathers' shoulders while driving at night in a present whose complexities mount up in tangled layers, one humming cable at a time.

The letters I'm writing don't look like anything else, or, to put it another way, they do; but they keep on being deployed, disposed, inlaid and outlaid across the green sky of a new mind; or, to put it differently, each bird sings its own tune, unstoppable for as long as it continues, and when you put them all together, they are the tuning up of a great orchestra, too beautiful for the mind to see.

Back in the USA, my wife and I were driving to my stepfather's house, and we saw some boxes of books out on the curb. I pulled over and we scavenged some. A year later, one night in Vienna at about one in the morning, I started looking at one of the books, In America by Susan Sontag, and I found that Sontag had autographed it. The other morning I was sitting in front of the classroom wearing my new green suit and I noticed that a black human hair had been deliberately sewn into the sleeve near the buttons. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was about 20 cm long. Some worker saying hi from China. At a used bookstore I bought an English language textbook published in Dresden in 1932. It was full of sentences like "Have you ever ridden in an airship?" As I was leafing through it, I found a page of sentences written by some student in 1945; and then two dried, flattened edelweiss flowers fell out. I had never seen them before, but I knew what they were right away because they were shaped like the silver edelweiss pins on felt hats from the Alps. In real life they looked like little fuzzy white starfish on stems. My first edelweiss flowers; they're lying on my bookshelf now.

The writer wrote and wrote, drop after drop of ink skydiving out of the pen to land on the page, saying nothing and everything. Meanwhile the wind wrote and wrote upon the earth in its transparent language. The fire wrote upon the wood, and, in doing so, destroyed or transformed it. The smoke sketched its poetry upon the sky, which tore it apart and scattered it to the four directions. The waves wrote upon the shore, endlessly revising. The light wrote upon the darkness and the darkness upon the light, the night upon the day and the day upon the night. The sun writes flowers on the earth. The earth writes people on the sky. The people write poems. The poems contain things like people and animals, suns, moons, and stars, fires and winds and waters. The poems cradle these things gently like immense hands. Everyone knows that people write poems, but what's a little less obvious is that poems write people too.

Dreamt I went to the moon with some friends, just for a couple of hours, to pick strawberries, then came back.

Hello, can I help you? No, I’m afraid he’s out of the office right now, he’s just stepped out for a bite, it seems he has a meeting at the factory, drinking tea out of the bottom of a very old bathtub seven meters deep. Is there anything I can help you with? Can anyone else help you? Would you care to leave a message? No, I’m not sure when he’ll be back in, could be weeks, days, nanoseconds, he could be here already, hiding, invisible, dissolved in the air or perched like an insect on the curtain, I can almost smell his cologne, I can almost feel his sweat drying on my back. Shall I take a message for him? Just a minute, let me get the message pad. “Bite the wizened rhinoceros at dawn.” Sorry, how do you spell rhinoceros? OK, let me read that back to you. R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-U-S. Oh, R-O-S. Rhinoceros. Bite the wizened. At dawn. And you need how many pieces of part number 3136655449? Only six? Delivery by airship and antback to be paid by client and takes six business yugas. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. No, I don’t think that’s very wise. In fact it seems to me that you must be some vile creeping carnivore for suggesting it. It’s unforgivably dangerous, cloudy, insipid, mind-boggling, mind-flaying, mind-frogging, 75-sided, wondrous. Goat flames licking up your trouser legs. This naked aggression will not stand. I will unleash upon you the mother of all telephone calls. Have you ever seen an invisible werewolf? I’ll throw hundreds of them at your head like baseballs. Even now I am virtually grinding your naked foot in the invisible meat grinder that I keep on the floor beside by desk. It was very expensive, something like $599, but I got it this past January at a post-Christmas sale for 30% off. It is encrusted with precious stones, but who would ever know, because the darn thing’s invisible, heh-heh. I’ll dam up your workflow with a fifty-billion-dollar construction project. But these are empty threats, because when all is said and done, I am a peaceful person. Currently I am deep in meditation. I have not even stirred to answer the telephone. I'm sitting in a deep golden bathtub atop a high stone tower with the soles of my feet pressed together. So if you think carefully you will also come to the conclusion that I am not speaking to you. You and I are simply fleeting thoughts in the mind of a loving, though somewhat dizzy, God. Good. Good. I’ll tell him you called. OK. OK. Have a nice day. Thanks, you too. Goodbye. Goodbye now.

The other evening I was reading some of Walt Whitman's prose works from the 1860s, and that period of time in US history seemed vividly alive in my imagination, both oddly familiar and completely alien. In the night I dreamt I had a thick book that described architectural projects undertaken then. I was looking at etchings of monuments. Architects had designed eight or ten different lofty neoclassical buildings with columns and domes, and workers had carved them out of solid stone in the Rocky Mountains, but as negative spaces, leaving building-shaped holes like molds into which some substance could have been poured or sprayed. Tourists would enter them through broad tunnels underneath, and look up into the dimness at the vaults of the domes; there were small skylights cut into the top to let light in.

A couple months ago in the mountainous center of Austria I attended a conference and trade fair on shamanism. One day, members of a local club devoted to birds of prey showed up, dressed in traditional Austrian clothes and carrying their pets -- two falcons, two hawks and a golden eagle. The birds were very comfortable around people, allowing themselves to be petted. Their faces seemed the essence of pride. They kept forgetting that they were tied to their owners' arms. They would see someplace they wanted to fly to, and launch themselves toward it, and immediately fall in a flurry of feathers that hung by a strap from the owner's leather glove. When this happened, the owner would immediately hoist the bird up again to his wrist, and for another few minutes it would not try to fly anywhere, just stare around boldly, the sovereign of all it surveyed.