Again Is Life: Twelve

You stand watching. Don't move. You can touch, but don't. It seems that to touch is to wake. And you don't want to wake. Not now, not ever. Rather, within this dream, in this white room, before this open hand, you want to stand forever. To see from every angle what it once held, what it holds now, what it will hold next.

But the hand says nothing. The hand remains a hand. Open, empty, voiceless. In the center of the room. Within the dream. You cannot leave, nor do you wish to. Yet waking heeds no desire. It comes in its own time, and often far too quickly.

Whether the hand will close, whether it will vanish—this you'll never know. You will return to your own room. To the cracked ceiling, the grey sea, the familiar silence. And that hand will remain below, in that country behind your eyes, where all things wait for the next dream. If the watcher's eyes ever close, then again.

Then another dream. Or perhaps another face of the same dream. This time you can see yourself from outside. You are sitting in a chair, inside the room, as you always are. But now the dream watches you from without. As if the dream has its own camera. Head bowed slightly, hands resting on your knees, grey light falling through the window.

And then, from above, a hand begins to descend. Not your hand—another's. From the darkness overhead, slowly, so slowly, as if it fears it will wake you. From that void beyond where the ceiling ends. It seems no part of any body; only a hand. Descending toward your bowed head.

Like rain bending slowly over the grain. Then it comes to rest. On your head. So gently. As one places a hand on a sleeping child's head with care, so as not to break the sleep. As a blanket settles of its own accord upon the body.

The hand comes to rest upon your head. It holds. And you feel this holding. That warmth, that soft stillness, which you have not known in so long. Not since your mother—before your mother, even, from some darkness prior, when something held you, and yet it was not a hand; the darkness itself was holding, an invisible embrace, that keeps, unwilled.

Then another hand comes, or a cloth, held within the hand. It comes to your eyes. It wipes. Wipes what? Water. You didn't know that water comes from your eyes in the night. There's no reason for it. Yet the water is there. The dream's hand wipes it, something no one wipes in daylight. That is not the doorkeeper's work, nor your own. For to wipe is to care, and you ceased caring long ago.

But the dream has not ceased. The dream sends its hand. To wipe, to hold, to rest gently upon your head, that head which no one touches all day. From one end to the other, parched, untouched, as if a desert without touch. Only at night does it receive a touch. Only the dream touches it, when the watcher sleeps, if ever truly sleeping.

The hand descends, stays, wipes, holds. Then very slowly it rises. Returns to the darkness above. Why it came, who sent it, the darkness will not say, will never say. And you are alone again. In your chair. Head bowed. The touch you'd just received is gone now. Yet your body remembers. Your bones remember.

# Even If the Mind Forgets

This is the ordinary law. Long after the touch has withdrawn, for those who remain alive carrying its memory.

You have thought about that hand. Day after day, you have thought about it. Dreams melted like ice; once it lay in your palm, then became water and vanished. But its coldness, or warmth—call it what you will—it lingers still.

Then it occurs to you: was that hand truly the hand of the objects in the room? Does a cup reach out? A chair, a table, a glass-eyed dog. Do they come through the threshold of dreams at night to touch what you cannot touch by day? In daylight they have no hands, only surfaces—wood, ceramic, glass. But in dreams that surface becomes a hand. Cold ceramic transforms into warmth. Hard wood becomes soft fingers. Glass eyes become a gaze that doesn’t merely see but holds, erases, does what you yourself cannot do even for yourself in the waking world.

While you are awake you show no care; neither does any guard. But at night the things take care of you, through the dream. Through that descending hand which comes, which erases, which holds. Perhaps this is the secret life of objects, their nocturnal being.

When you do not see, when the watcher falls asleep, the things awaken. In silence they tend to you. Perhaps they always have. You simply did not know. By day with their surfaces, by night with their hands. This is the ordinary law of things—those that quietly bear the weight of the lives living within them.

Then the dream shifts. No hand, no room. You are outside. Standing on a surface—whether it is water or ice you cannot tell; it could be glass, or the skin of some vast sleeping creature. As if a giant lay beneath the earth, and you stood upon its hide.

Whether that dream came after or before, there is no way to say. For dreams do not follow sequence. Before and after are meaningless to them. All dreams seem to happen at once, in that country behind the eyes where there are no clocks, no time, no before, no after.

Another dream. Or another form of the same dream. You are pulling something through some undefined terrain that is neither wholly earth nor water. Dense. Sticky. It clings like cobweb to your skin. With each step you must wrench your own body free from some invisible resistance. Every movement is a battle.

That density has its own warmth—greyish, like the darkness before birth—but it does not release you. As a room will not let you leave, as a chair will not let you rise, so too this thick matter holds everything fast. To move through it is to meet obstruction.

And behind you, tied fast, is a rope. Thin, rough, it cuts your hand when you pull. At its end, a heavy wooden box. Closed. You do not know what lies inside it now, though you opened it once, long ago. Then you found old things. A cup, some photographs, a key, the broken implements of survival—the machinery of a life that no longer exists. They serve no purpose, yet you cannot discard them.

The box is like your archive, your past, which you drag through this thickness as if there is still some “after” ahead. Yet the box is heavier than you are. The walking, already difficult, becomes harder still.

You could cut the rope. You could lighten yourself by letting it go.

Without the cup, without the picture, without that key that could open any lock—I don’t remember those things anymore. Yet you cannot cut. You are unable to cut. Because the rope is not really rope; it is another kind of connection that has grown between you and the box over time, something that has become part of your own body. To cut it would be like cutting your own hand.

So you keep pulling. Gasping. The box and you, both of you moving through that thickness toward nowhere at all. Carrying things that have no use anymore, only weight. And that weight is added to a movement that is already heavy enough.

The box and you—an ancient pair. Human and memory, a coupling that rivals birth itself in its antiquity. You pull, and it is pulled; it cannot be fully opened, cannot be used, cannot be discarded. The box is the past, what lies within it is memory, and the rope is binding. All three are heavy. None of the three will be severed. So in that thickness, your task is only one: to keep pulling. The past, memory, binding, toward that invisible beyond.

And within that thickness, someone is there. Ahead, or behind—the direction is unclear. Another body. Another presence. You are moving toward it, or is it moving away from you? Impossible to say. Call it the “Other.” Not any particular person; only the Other. That Other whom you have sought your whole life long. Sometimes in a woman’s face, sometimes in a dog’s eyes, sometimes in glass as your own reflection. As if it were everywhere.

From some time before names, you have been moving toward it. Through the thickness. It is always just ahead, or just behind. Its heavy breathing seems almost audible; the warmth of its body can almost be felt even within the cold thickness. You can almost touch it. Almost.

But the Other says nothing. There is no place for words there. It only moves, as you move. Toward you, or away from you. Both seem true at once. In dreams, such contradictions are possible: to move toward the other is to move away; to reach is to fail to reach again. Two people in darkness, in thickness, moving toward each other or in opposite directions, and yet nothing happens. No one stops. No one arrives.

By ordinary rules.

By the rules of thickness. By that which holds all things, releases nothing completely. You keep pulling toward that Other, who is always there, yet never fully present. Always almost. Almost there. Almost grasped. But only almost. Never complete.

After waking, you sat thinking about that thickness. The thickness dissolved, as dreams dissolve, but the memory remained. Then it seemed that thickness was simply a medium through which we move. And sometimes, within that medium, certain patterns can be seen. Like a spider’s web, like cracks, or perhaps only the eye’s mistake.

In dreams, you cannot trust the eye. But in waking life—do you fare much better? There, that thickness has another name: time, perhaps; habit, perhaps; the weight of accumulated days; the exhaustion of many mornings; the stagnation of many afternoons; the grey accumulation of many years. All of it makes movement difficult. Each step falls heavy as mud. Arrival becomes slow. And you remain caught, apart from that Other, who is always just ahead.