I have often dreamt that I was Chinese. I have had many dreams in which I am speaking Chinese or that I work in an opium den at the turn of the century in New York City's Chinatown. The following is a full dream I had back in the early 1980's. I woke up and immediately and wrote the following down. The title of this piece is what I gave to the dream at the time.
I didn't know that I was Chinese until I came outside and looked into the eyes of a God. I didn't know that the young woman I loved was my daughter until my husband, a man I never knew, strapped her to his lap and went before a firing squad to die. I didn't know anything consciously.
It began in the evening at a strange party. Music, food, people mingling and reenacting all the usual party maneuvers. The sound system was outside the windows, which were thirty stories up, suspended by heavy cables, being whipped about by high winds. Young hippies were crawling around on the apparatus trying to outdo the last sound decibel. "One notch louder", was the mantra they chorused as one.
The wind at this altitude caused considerable stress on the suspended system. At one point the wind became so ferocious that the windowpanes began to thunder convex, roar concave, threatening to implode as though we were under pressure. As though we were in an airplane -- precariously tethered to a false sense of security, lulled even deeper by the drinks in our hands.
The room was in the shape of half a hexagram and was split level. It seemed, if I remember correctly, to have what I imagined to be miles of counter space. Everything was in shades of gray. Some might describe the look as chrome and glass, yet despite this not being a look I like, I felt comfortable and relaxed.
Before I was fully aware, as often happens at parties, the room filled with the orchestra of multiple voice patterns creating a cacophonous vibration in my ears. It was after I had gone to the upper level to refill my drink from the liquors assembled on a table and had begun twisting my way back down, that two men suddenly seized me by my elbows and tried to guide me outdoors. I heard them say that it was time for me to return. I heard them suggest that I was crazy. I heard them imply that I was unfit. I heard them give voice to the sense of failure that sailed inside me. In their glance of askance I felt myself weep and it was then that I learned shame.
I struggled free from their grasp and found myself abruptly and tenderly invited over by two sisters from the Order of Mercy, those wonderful hybrids from the island of Lesbos. These two, Carmen and Dulcimer, were non-related sisters; one the younger of herself, the other the elder. Both were dressed in black, each drinking white wine. I could see myself loved in their eyes and felt caressed and sensual. I would have stayed forever had the brown girl not walked by and brushed her down against my arm. Had she not touched me I would never have gone out into the dawn and witnessed her death.
My senses became acute. I could smell like an animal -- see like an eagle. I could no more have not wanted her than I could have existed without breath. She became a sustaining thing -- a nourishing thing.
We found a spot by the window to sit. It was pitch outside, not a star to be seen and she stretched out naked, like a Botticelli lynx; breathtaking and naked. I can't remember if she arrived this way, or if I dressed her. I like to think she arrived this way. She came to me vulnerable and shameless.
The color of her skin was walnut, and like a walnut with its dark skinned center, so were the areoles of her small breasts. Her skin was flawless, a thing that always fills me with admiration for I have never had such skin and I become smitten and prone to swooning when encountering the flawlessness of others. I spend hours imaging all the ways it might be touched: with fingertips or palms spread flat, perhaps wth the back of my hand.
So there she is before me naked and I reach for her and cup her breast in my hands. I run my hands over her body and drift off to a place that lulls me. A place in the calm seas. It is the rocking motion and the salt that pulls me along. I kiss her mouth and lick her salty skin. A foghorn permeated my auditory dew. It wasn't a sensual gesture that drew my hands to her body but rather an involuntary response to an earthy perfectly brown creature created by Botticelli and brought to life by the encroaching dawn and me.
Her hair was jet black and straight as though made of glass filaments. You almost got the impression that you could sit one day and count each strand for it sprung from her head looking clearly separate. Each an individual -- all of it glorious and rich.
As dawn arrived the party came to an end. I have no recollection as to where everyone drifted off to. I must have been terribly focused on my gift for I failed to pay attention. I had meant to bid farewell to Carmen and Dulcimer but they were not to be found at this moment in time. For this moment I regretted having lost them but these two sisters were not mine to begin with.
The sun rose. The brown one and I walked into the courtyard and here is where my greatest sorrow derives from. Here's where I watched my daughter die at the hands of her father; a man I never met.
His soldiers seized she and I. He had been waiting for us to emerge from our tall tower. He had arranged four thrones made of stone -- one to the east, to the south, to the west and to the north, each facing its directional opposite. Crouched to the right of each throne was a Chinese man with a rifle aimed at the throne opposite him. I watched horrified as the brown girl's father had our daughter strapped to his lap as he sat in the throne of the south. It was then that I saw Dulcimer and Carmen in the seats of the north and the east. The west chair was empty and I was sure it was there that I was to be placed. Instead I was taken to a makeshift platform located directly behind the north throne forcing me to view my lovely love's death in all its violent splendor. A noose made of flax from the shore of the river Lanaria gripped my neck like a necklace from Hades. I prayed my neck would snap at the same moment my daughter, my lover, was riddled with bullets but fate kept my sad soul intact. I dangled long enough to see four limp bodies, wasted and pathetic, strapped to stone.
I was led down from the platform by a god with a barrel chest who never saw me but always knew where I was. He had a thick mustache and wore a fez. He controlled my direction with his arms using them like a rudder and I being the sea. I was coaxed along, kept from harm, but yet he never saw my eyes.
One day after many months I positioned myself in front of the god and demanded that he see me. I am persistent; I am demanding. Slowly his gaze which had previously be trained on the harm in the distance, fell to my eye and it was then, in the reflection of his eyes that I saw for the first time that I was Chinese.
It is now that unspoken affection begins between us. It is also then that I discover that when the light is just so he shimmers like fish scales and like fish shoaling or schooling he sometimes appeared small and as thin as the air. His name was Roman and I love him. With Roman I am safe from the unknown and the harm that is sure to befall me in life.
Sometimes he calls my name but I feel interrupted from thoughts of him with thoughts of my love as daughter. He calls me anyway from far, far away and again I long for my daughter and feel determined not to abandon her. I will say prayers to her departed being. I will steer clear of activities designed to take my mind off of her. I have plans with Roman. I want his hands on my body. I just want. But Roman persists as he calls me to him. I am eager to stat my new life at his side in this small Chinese village. I will toil and love. He may have my heart. He may have my souls -- he is calling. He is calling and I must go.
I mourn all the way to the Peekskill train station for the family I've left behind in China.
(I realize and remember as I type this here that I was studying The Iliad at the time and my head was chock a block with mythology hence, I think, all the wild references to mythologies).
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