On Rejection

Last night I dreamed I was new arrived again, and fell to weeping in my sleep. Those who welcomed me, rejected, accepted, attacked, tolerated or disapproved of me: I’ve forgiven you all. Some indeed have by now forgiven me.

     Why then do tears run down in sleep? Sleep, the alternative world, is peopled with the past, a treasure-store of memory:  prop-room, wardrobe, prompt-box, rehearsal space for life’s cautionary dramas.

     Proust says a cast of divinities inhabits memory: those people who have made us suffer. Recollection comes through the senses, an uneven paving-stone, for instance, and Venice appears. For me the question ‘How d’you like Australia?’— once a common expression — awakened memory to work again in sleep.

     All this was decades ago, many have died, and died heroic deaths, too. Yet in memory, in sleep, they live to perform their roles. As Proustian divinities, they’re only a metaphor: they point to the joy received when they embrace instead of doubting.

     Is life so personal? The rational mind would allow, explain, excuse, comprehend. In sleep, though, the mind recounts its private story. What I’ve learned is this: for the love of God, treat your immigrants well. The marks are indelible.

On Visitation

‘One thing only is needful.’ I once knew a saint who died, as all saints do. He appeared to me in dreams, seated before a large book open before him on a table. He was correcting it in pencil, saying, ‘I’m editing the works of the poet here; it’s what I’ve returned to do. But I can’t be turned aside from it, because my time is limited.’

            As with Proust, who thought the world of sleep a separate room, into which we enter from daylight reality to meet another cast of characters, a different script, an altered life, I’m bemused to find the dead moving and speaking in dreams. Surely such visitations have meanings, beyond psychology?

            Do the beloved dead return, giving touches of comfort or understanding unhoped for in waking hours? Can warnings be given, answers to dilemmas, instructions, pleas? What is the one thing needful?

            Hundreds of bodies scattered across the road, in places far distant from one another, maybe. What was the one thing needful? From what must one not be turned aside? Where are the words of the poet, what are we here to do? We are not saints, but sinners, and our time is limited.