HUE AND LAUGHTER

That white gloved lady crossing over the border of my dream -- is an annoyance! First off, she has arrived in the land of reality without an image of herself, the usual passport. Well even though, dear reader, this description lacks certain essentials, or even most of them, a key provision of my contract with the Muse requires sharing it.

How is that? What is the land of reality?

What I've provided is no more substantial than the dream itself. Yet these words already assume a reality across space and time. Such are the presumptions we make daily. There might be a suspicion that we're making it up as we go along. But mustn’t we? It's how we're made – out of cells, membranes with walls, inventing spaces, storing things to be used.

And remember Tonto? What is this we, white man? The Lone Ranger rides again, real as ever.

There she goes, back over the border . . .

So, what is the square root of a tree? An answer would surely exceed winning the lottery. Odds of finding it are longer than discovering the runes of Italian history. Hidden in words, the runes of aeons are still digesting. Traces of subterranean fumes that fueled oracles at Delphi have spanned countless generations -- “Loco weed stewed is more gently chewed.” Indigestible and still producing gas is the square root of negative 1. Mathematically written, it is i, called the imaginary. Not to imply that something wicked this way comes. But cracks in the wall of precision are scarcely permitted, hardly admitted, the valley of death for those trying to plug the hole with a pencil.

Oh, let that metaphor rise like scum in the bilge water of journalism. It will be abandoned upon reaching the other shore. It was simply imaginary. All a fabrication. Logic, given its own rules, makes sense.

Try this: Humpty Dumpty is a cautionary tale. “Don't be a fence sitter.” Better, we're told, to stay on the ground, one side or the other. Oh, you fell off? Too bad. For all the king's horses, all his men, it will be: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Indeed, a predicate without a subject is an orphan. Unthinkable.

Now is perhaps a green forest, now perhaps an avocado leaf, possibly launching a caterpillar, once its wings are born. Spinning silk is by right an opportunity. It is an education not traveled in words, but made in the opportune moment of Madame Butterfly discovering herself in song. I say no one can miss this, who listens carefully to a breeze. Or watching the dance of waves across a lake. Interference patterns resemble hip-hop gesticulations. And when calm returns, mosquito-eaters stand tippy-toe on dimples. Water has a face? When the mosquito is gone, look in there. Reality maintains itself against burlesque imitations, reserving a red scarf for Madame on stage, and the one and only birth of an avocado leaf.

Now that the TV is off, both cats have retired. They share the blanket on my feet.. They are dozing off. Ah, the neighborhood is quiet, the night is young, 12:30 by the clock on the dresser. The weatherman on the evening news said high winds are coming, announced a red flag warning for the entire bay area, then switched over to a PG&E spokesperson who was expressing regret for cutting power to over 300,000 customers. So far, Santa Clara has been unaffected by the Profit Protection Power Shutoff; high winds happening elsewhere. A morphological field of sleeping cats seems beneficial.

This idyllic description goes along clip-pity-clop, necessarily so given accumulations of language. Just so. But this, on stilts, is a finely carved cane. It is a crane standing in a creek bed, spindly in the desiccated air. With our collective consciousness, it will climb concrete stairs to reach stranded abodes.

The aura of nonpurring, nonsnoring dreamland without walls is almost evaporating. One might imagine a wheelbarrow full of black birds sitting in rows, having scattered harvest seeds in the bird feeder. They have no dreams of invisible schemes, but they create a shield that resists intruders, moving them off towards an aurora borealis in ghostly green displays

I miss the TV sets of yore, with their Cathode Ray Tubes. Lacking a signal, the screen would display snow, dancing random white spots, often better than the intended programs. And the tube would not give up after being turned off, continuing to glow on its own. In those days, no one suspected them of intelligence or surveillance.

Sleeping cats are the darkest of primeval consciousness. They are similar to the Distant Early Warning system of CRT days, quietly inhabiting the Arctic Circle, doing nothing mostly. What dreams could they share?

Civilization in its shambles is drifting towards an out of body experience. It is perhaps precognitive, and thus better than intended. As it shifts over the border, changing from white to colors such as painters mix, in shades that exist for the first time, the aurora's magic curtain is shifting, shifting . . .people starting to notice.

The white gloved lady is gone, almost. No afterglow, but maybe a faint echo. Laughter?