Reel

A dream is a film happening while you watch.

A boy running with a flowered pillowcase flying from his hand like a cape. Where did he get it?

The boy in a space like a dog-trot— the open space between the two sides of a house. But this space between houses. The pillowcase a sail. How the boat got to Patmos to depart from John. Banished for preaching Christ. How in dreams things are the same and also their upward counterpart.

I was in a hefty place. A ditch by the road. Watching the boy running. Then I was awake, and he was gone. A bully is the waking part. 

This is the line of grief we must bear.

I heard later the wind blew down the Taco Bueno sign.  It fell into Burger King, shutting them both down until the windows could be replaced. Where would we eat?

I could imagine I was with John the Drifter. The one banished to Patmos Island where there was not tree or any provision. Volcanic in origin.

I had questions for which I was in trouble. Until I sat on the back row. I asked how John wrote on Patmos. Had he thought to bring parchment and pen? His wax tablet and stylus? Did parchment drop from heaven like manna? Had authorities allowed him a travel bag to exile? A rucksack?

At night, John gathered stones to place on the edges of his outer cloak. To hold it down. So he could cover himself, sleep, and not chase the cloak blowing in the night wind that peeled off the sea.  

A man with the wind in his hand. You know the tomato-stand on the corner?

Is the Aegean Sea salty?  I asked the teachers at the Church of the Risen Lord. Was there a well on the island?  How did John get water as he wrote on the island without a tree to shade him?  Did he make a booth with his outer cloak?  What did he prop it on?  Did he bring tent poles?  Did authorities make a make-shift tent before they left him on the island?

And the sweet teacher at the Church of Risen Lord who had cupcakes for brains did not answer.

How did John start a fire to cook a fish? Did he bring a pole?  A hook?  And bait?  Wait. All of them were fishermen of the patrol of miracles. They called the fish to jump on the shore.  In the heat, a fish could cook on a hot stone in the sun.

John was told to write what he saw. And the film began. The little beasts around the throne with their bleatings and mooings and howls, saying blessing and honor and glory and power to the Lamb forever.

We thought of running from the church. There was a wide field beyond the tree-line. They would not miss us. The first turn past the Dry Goods Store.

Once, the island of Patmos was called Letois. Named after Artemis. It was at the bottom of the sea. But when the moon shined upon the water, Artemis saw the island and wanted it for her own. She asked Zeus, who was god at the time, to raise the island to the surface of the sea.

Or there is the story that Orestes, after murdering Clytemnestra, his mother, fled to Patmos when Erynies was after him.

The boy with the flying pillowcase trailing off his hand. The narrow space to run between.

The elders up there on their benches watching us.

These two-pronged stories, whose histories don’t match but overlap, sometimes contradicting one another.

They found us hiding in the ditch. We returned to the place we ran from. We were not punished.  Only watched. If we moved. A shackle lifted on the bird of prey. The wistfulness that screeched before each breath. We would have floated over time.

We are walking the shore in penance. Not full of beasts and elders and the sea upheaving and the mountains dismantled. The excess of our lives independent of the mooring it takes. 

How many stories do you have going on, the critics asked?

There are multiple projects, I answered. It seems now the stories mixed. I could not tell one from another. Or in which story they belonged. But braided together the way traffic waits around every corner. We sat at the curb watching. The truck arriving with the large plate-glass windows to repair Burger King. The Taco Bueno sign still askew. Farther down the road, the large, tin rooster on the old Mi Casa van on its side.

What is the real story? They kept asking. What point of view are you in? 

Didn’t they know we lived in several parallel worlds? Not set aright. One level missing another.  Left to fend. To tend this sweet side of bliss.

Subtext and subtitle

To Rem35mm

In the forest. On the forehead of leaves. A projector unrolls its story.

A spool from which moving images move to the sub-spool below the lens.

The story comes from the earliest critical theory. Of voices in a flood of narration in the coherence of the layered grasses of the will.

A dream presents the surreal edgings of the real.

I found the road-markers in the film. The onward-going structure was disrupted by thoughts of struggle tied to memory.

To mark with transitive contrariness. Outside of which could not be understood. Two spools turning on a projector unrolling and rolling past the lens.

Banished to a barren island. Until the stones could not hold down the island and it rose.