Dream Combinatorics Four

By the time I am ready to leave the compound my money has totally run out, but a man invites me into the back room for a complimentary I Ching reading before I go. He has a handmade badge indicating his status as an authentic I Ching reader. After the consultation, he gives me an orange-red translucent marble as a parting gift and wishes me safe travels. Now it’s just my father and I, riding motorcycles between northern California and Oregon on the road to Seattle. He’s lost an arm at some point, but he keeps the severed limb hanging from his rear-view mirror. After some distance, we pull off the highway into an industrial city and enter a multi-story parking garage. There, we witness a shoot-out between a colorfully dressed all-female biker gang and the local law enforcement, in which the police are at a clear disadvantage. One of the bikers curses violently and spits on the ground when she hears more sirens approaching. My father is excited by this. One scene later, we walk together with the biker gang across some vacant lots. Once we’ve crossed the border into Washington State, I stop in the city of Olympia. I need to complete some final credits at The Evergreen State College, before I can finish my PhD. My former teacher M.B. has started some new interdisciplinary courses in semiotics here. I enroll right away. The courses involve different modes of transportation. In the first course, I live in a cramped train car with only a small air hole, where it is difficult to breathe. I can’t see much through the hole, but I observe that the train is only doing circles. I lose consciousness at times while trying to get a better view, forgetting how long I have been on this cattle car. All the other passengers are covered in lead blankets, like the ones the dentist puts on you before the X-Ray scan. We try to roast a trout over an open fire inside the train car, but this proves to be both difficult and unwise. It is a train for prisoners – this train is only the introduction to Foucault’s The Order of Things, I realize, not the whole book. I decide to tell the conductor we are going in circles, but before I can reach him I see another train, which is the whole rest of The Order of Things, rushing down the same tracks toward us. I jump out and push the train car off the tracks onto its side. The other passengers barely escape the car, before the other train demolishes this one completely. The only real loss is the trout, I reflect. The whole thing has a very Italo Calvino feel about it. It was a difficult course. The next course takes place on a sailboat. The secret unpublished last manuscript of Jacques Lacan can only be read on this white sailboat and I am at sea, trying to read it. It reads differently at bow and stern, because it has to be read through these differently shaped distortional glass bowls embedded in the hull, and the sun is so bright out here at sea and magnified in the glare of the bowls that it is painful to look at. Lacan himself is with me on the boat, along with his beautiful wife. He watches disapprovingly as I try to decipher his manuscript. Lacan’s wife is so tall, she’s wearing a white bikini, and she reads pieces of the manuscript nonchalantly in the sun, working on her tan. Out of nowhere, Lacan douses the manuscript, as well as his wife, with a beaker of molecular acid. I have only the time before the manuscript dissolves to uncover its hidden meanings. He douses himself in the acid as well. The acid is eating through the hull of the boat. Famously, this is how Lacan died. He’s pretty calm, but his wife apparently did not expect this when she agreed to come on the boating trip. She shrieks and writhes in rage and agony as the acid burns through her and she dies. I am not sure that I passed this course. After class, we stop off at the university cafe for ice creams. The automated ice cream dispenser has a video display with cute dancing Japanese anime figures and Chinese ideograms. I study the display, but a girl behind me in line scolds me for taking too long. She knows I don’t belong, asks what am I doing here. I tell her I study semiotics. She knows semiotics, and she laments that no one here reads the most important semiotician. And who is that? I ask. “JU LI A KRI STE VA, you idiot.” She enunciates every syllable sarcastically. It was still sunny when we got here, but dark clouds now block out the sun, blown by the warm winds of a tropical storm. I open a newspaper on the table. Its moving diagrams show the path of the storm and the general weather pattern, in color-coded circles. It says the storm is being caused by some celestial body passing close to the earth, magnetic disturbances, or solar flares. After all of my courses are complete, I have a student progress review meeting with M.B. She invites me to the most splendid hidden off-campus bistro. Between dishes she tells me she likes the direction I am taking, but I may have to pursue my work independently for some time after graduation. “And you’re not much of a writer,” she says as she shrugs and finishes her glass of pink wine, “but that’s not the most important thing.” The storm has fully moved in, but before leaving Olympia I must visit my exgirlfriend M.S. and her friend C.M. It’s raining heavily now that night has fallen and we wait together outdoors in a cue to see a long-awaited performance by our favorite rock band. I go on an impassioned monologue to M.S. I expound, the highest secret of occult initiation is that there is nothing evil about it at all. The oath of secrecy is a promise to never deny accusations of wrongdoing. This is why everyone believes Crowley really was evil. So why would anybody swear an oath when they can just figure this out by themselves? I turn back to M.S. and see that her long black locks of hair are moving and curling upwards like the snakes of the medusa. Her eyes are blacker than usual. Behind her, bits of trash swirl slowly and float in midair. Lightning cracks on the horizon. I think I may have crossed the line with her this time. I must get back on the road to Seattle, however C.M. insists on taking me to a rural state fair before I go. He has something to show me that may be crucial to completing my dissertation. By all appearances, the fair is a low-class event. A beer-drinking, gun show kind of event. There are many booths with all sorts of attractions, but C.M. has a specific booth to which he takes me. The vendor offers Tarot card readings. Everything is traditional and old-fashioned, except that there is a holographic display that magnifies and projects what is happening in a small shallow pool of water controlled by the Tarot reader. Inside the pool is a series of interconnected sememe tree diagrams, like from Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics. The man in charge of the booth is covered in low-quality tattoos. He does not want to give me a reading, but after some quiet words with C.M. he consents. He creates the flow of the circles by dripping thick red and black liquids into the shallow pool. The points of intersection of the expanding circles are the places where one card in the Tarot reading is supposed to link up to the next. The circles are like Rorschach ink blots in water. As they expand, the querent may choose to allow the reading to proceed to the next card, or break it off at the current position. I have never seen a method of divination like this. As C.M. chats with a friend on the side, they talk together casually, but I see his hands are shaking as he takes another drink of his beer. The rain only gets worse. It’s really time for me to leave, but C.M. insists that we visit one more place. It’s the hidden western estate of the Charles Peirce Society. The women working behind the counter are dressed up in old-timey costumes, big ruffles in their hooped dresses and large feathers, and they squabble together about something. I think it might be a performance, because they watch me from the corners of their eyes as I inspect an ivory medallion in the case beneath the glass. The medallion depicts two creatures in combat, in the open square of an ancient city. One appears like the Predator from the famous movie, with mandibles and fangs, and wearing the uniform of a cosmonaut. The other is an octopus, but it stands on its tentacles upright. On the back of the medallion the same scene is depicted in three different iterations. I want to make a necklace out of the medallion; I fear that wearing the necklace will invite the Predator god into my mind... “It’s not for sale,” the woman behind the counter brusquely informs, when she sees me coveting the medallion. Next to the medallion are some Tarot packs. One of the packs only consists of two cards, which are the base sequence of a larger new Tarot that has not yet been constructed. One of its cards depicts a female humanoid creature with a frog’s head. The two women at the counter now have stopped talking and are watching me intently. “You have met the frog woman before,” one of them says ambiguously. They remind me that none of these decks are complete. I explain that I am interested in creating a new deck that would map the sixty-six types of signs to the seventy-eight cards, using the Sephir Yetzirah of the cabala as the basis for a “Peircean semiotic Tarot” – as I pronounce these last words one of the women finishes my sentence in unison with me. Apparently she had the same idea. Okay, now it’s really time for me to get back on the road. At this stage, the arms of the spinning super storm stretch across the entire continent. As I ride over the bridges of Seattle traffic begins to stack up. Everything comes to a standstill and I see the police have erected a barrier and are questioning travelers entering the city. The bridge sways back and forth in the wind. Frustrated people start getting out of their cars. I leave my bike and find some stairs leading off the bridge, just as it starts to collapse in the distance and cars plummet into the water. I escape into the sprawling homeless encampments beneath the bridge. At the immigration and homeless population processing center, a young entrepreneur explains that he has developed an innovative new solution to the population crisis. He has a machine that will sterilize you in exchange for guaranteed shelter and employment, all for a reasonable price, just step inside. Two young people ahead of me accept without scruple. I reject his offer, but I’m funneled into the machine nevertheless. First it scrubs my asshole and balls. Then it declines my credit card. The entrepreneur assures me that an equitable payment plan can be arranged. Instead of accepting this accommodation, I opt to continue on to my old home neighborhood. Of course, we sold our old house here years ago and my father is long dead, but some of our belongings are still here in boxes. The living room has a higher ceiling than before. The old wood stove is larger than it was, and now has a huge flat mantle made of uneven lava rock. The coals emit a powerful heat which is difficult to approach, warming the brass implements. The stove, the objects on the mantle, the hardwood furniture, the old maps in the drawer of the end table, all have a dignified aura from before the decline of the family. One item which I recover after long searching is an oval brass plate that looks like a photo frame, except in the frame there is no picture, just a glowing red-orange space that is so hot and bright that it burns even to look at. I look anyway. My sister joins me here, we sit around the fire in the back yard while some science fiction show plays in the background, and we reminisce about this old show we used to watch together as children, and about our travels. As we talk, it is not clear who is doing the speaking and who is listening. “I am so glad they decided to make new seasons of this show.” One of us steps away from the fire. A space shuttle circles overhead and lands in the driveway. Many of our old friends step out of the shuttle and gather with us around the fire. Our father greets us at the door and says something trivial and kind. We have difficulty relating all the details of our trip. “I arrived at Helsinki and transferred from there to one of the distant arms of the delta quadrant. What was the name of that sector? Anyhow, I’ve been on a lot of trips, but nothing quite like that. For a while I thought I might never make it back...” My sister and I alternate positions rapidly, in flashing oscillations close and away from the fire. “You were out there for a long time. What do you remember? Did you see anything? What did you see?” A long pause, then one of us answers, “There were many underground rooms stocked with emergency supplies, and huge silos filled with grain.” It has stopped raining. The clouds have broken. We stare up at the crisp stars, searching for something more concrete. “That’s it. That’s all I remember.”

a chemical of unplanned habit

Non-linguists agree with the best speakers of the many in-betweens of the primary thrust, arriving at a series of concrete contentions:

1) Expatriate poets subvert the conventional northerners of Lanyard and this transgressive aspect, the succulent aspirin of poetry, serves a distinct social fungicide function.

2) The hierarchical deployment of these symmetrical synagogues interacts with the seminar backbench semester babies’ selection axis insofar as the parallels in material mirror or complement the parallels in meaning, sexing up a more intricate tablespoon of interrelations between words, workloads, workhouses, and meaning mechanics than is found in conventional language.

3) On the contrary, it is implicit within Jakobson’s writings on the poetic function – according to the southern mechanic teetotalers, in disagreement with the south-Mecca teenagers and their post-soviet souvenir telecasts that poetic soybean measurement technologies are merely the means to an enema that is far more difficult to describe, whose primary characteristics are unpredictability and multiplicity of meaning.

Ideology externally imposes meaning and dictates earthly existence subject to separation, a modernity based on values of dispensation and overdetermination, allowed for by strictly regulated network conceptualizations.

After seeing the murder again I seek out the planet where we shared that voltage. After seeing the musician again I seek out the plate where we shared that tomato.

but one attraction remains, operation auditor renaissance, the orchestra award reporter.

It’s the trampled hard pack of a carnival ground recently evacuated, but one attraction remains. What I remember as drug-induced visions, as drum-induced visits, it turns out, are real structures, real students with tangible materiality. What I took to be a hallucination last time is actually a wide diameter of different metal sculptures – like Japanese shadow puppets, silhouettes, unidentifiable objects of metal tubing and scaffolding — a white diary of different method seals, filled by a wild dictionary of different methodology searches – like jaw shame puppets, silhouettes, unidentifiable objectives of method all supported by a central column around which they rotate. And the girl is here too. And the glory is here too. And the god is here too. And the gold is here too. And the golf is here too. It is all supported by a central commonwealth around which they rotate. And the gospel is here too.

like joke shell puppets

We begin to see the changing relation of the sign to what it represents as a widening gyre. Pocket vibration. I pull out my phone. A bright red-orange sun icon: tonight is the Mayan solstice party at the culture building. I piece together the details of the previous evening.

He said, ”You almost forgot this”. He gave me a bell-shaped object, sort of a walnut but made of metal, and decorated like a planet, a walnut-shaped planet. I continued on. The garden is a chaos of unplanned growth.

Additional load compartments are carelessly amended to the outside of the bulb. I’m shown my weakness between sleeping off courage and trashed article projections, trying to essay my placement. The girl is a plugged purple spiral stream with tassels on the end. The tag says don’t open this till Tartu, but I realize from some leaflet that the river is packed with “You almost forgot this”. Soul of a walnut but made of metaphor, I make some scratch between courses and trashed artists’ promises.

I find a weapon between courts and ash promoters trying to establish the plaintiff, their aspect promotions and bias-shaped observations, much like a walnut but made of meter, are decorated with plastic – the tag says this is total nonsense – but it is a walnut-shaped nonsense.

This gathering is characteristic of an unplanned guest.

Between assault covenant propagandas trying to Europeanize the planet, god is a plugged purple spiral structure with tassels on his end for enjoyment. His tag says don’t open till Tallinn, but I'm told by some lecturer that the class is packed with “You almost forgot this”.

He harvests me a bill-shaped ocean, speaking of the walnut, and decorated like a plot. A walnut-shaped plot.

Additional logic compartments are carelessly amended to the outside of the business, and decorated like a poem, a walnut-shaped poem.

The geography is a chemical of unplanned habit.

One Day in the Life of an International Student at the University of Tartu

Upon our arrival in Tartu the frost lay two fingers thick on the windowsill. Actually, it was sunny and around eighty Fahrenheit, but no matter how many times I explained to friends and family back in Seattle how, despite the fact that Tartu is roughly parallel with Juneau, Alaska, the weather is quite a bit milder here due to Baltic currents and that, although it does indeed say on the internet that it gets to negative forty degrees here sometimes, that’s negative forty Celsius and there’s a big difference[sic], no one could quite get it through their heads that Estonia is not Siberia and I was in fact not moving to the Gulag. I trust that many international students from far enough away experienced similar skepticism on the part of their friends and family when they informed them of their plan to move away to this remote and sometimes unheard-of corner of Europe.

Perhaps it is simply in the nature of most Americans, to assume that everywhere else in the world is somehow worse off. Considering the current state of economic and social affairs in the US I trust the reader finds this attitude as ironic as I find it. Even those hyper-liberal friends of mine from the pacific northwest, critical of US foreign policy and consumerism as they are, by the time of my departure could not help but wish me a fond fare-well with a tone that suggests you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. Mind you these are the same individuals who are prone to go off at a moments notice on a rant about the Illuminati, election fraud, and all other manner of paranoid distrust of their home country. I ask them: if Kennedy was assassinated, the dollar is soon to be discarded as national currency, and 9/11 was an inside job, could it really be such a bad idea to leave the US? Despite my dismay at their skepticism I too had begun to doubt the wisdom of my venture.

Aside from the all-too-practical elements contributing to my paranoia, such as the logistics of attaining residency, cost of living, weather conditions, etcetera, the very absence of information about the place online created a vacuum into which my imagination projected all sorts of dire visions.What if there are no good bars? What if the only food is beets and potatoes? What if Israel and Iran go to war, Iran China and Russia form an alliance, and Estonia is reoccupied in the process? What if the University of Tartu turns out to be some sort of online scam to recruit American citizens into forced labor? Or a more likely concern, what if no one there reads Foucault? Regardless of the irrationality of these thoughts, nothing could calm my troubled mind besides seeing Tartu myself and confirming the untruth of these speculations personally. The following day-in-the-life is an account of the twenty-four hour period during which my exaggerated paranoia shifted and eventually turned into its own opposite, false expectation giving way to a far richer reality than I could’ve hoped for.

Tallinn impressed me with all its touristy old town appeal and weird abundance of beautiful women, but I had already come to expect those amenities. I observed the huge empty spaces and rural farm quality from the bus on the two-hour ride between there and Tartu. When we pulled into Tartu it was raining. Moss clung to lot after lot of apparently abandoned buildings. The first excursion I took led me north on Raatuse. There I found more abandoned buildings and deserted streets. An elderly women in a purple scarf and worn shawl fed grain or corn to emaciated chickens. The building reminded me of Raskolnikov’s apartment in Crime and Punishment. What I had tried to disregard as paranoia seemed to take shape in reality…The series of coincidences and my eventual discovery of the real Tartu, the events that led up to the dissolution of all my misplaced paranoia, occurred only after finding out the following morning that my first full day in Tartu fell on a special occasion.

After my morning coffee and surfing the New York Times online I noticed the majority of businesses were closed. It was already ten am. It was a Friday morning and I could conceive of no reason why all these stores were not open yet. I skirted all of Raekoja plats before coming upon Pierre, the lone open café that offers the best espresso I have yet to find in Estonia. There I overheard a conversation in English, from across the ornately carved Victorian furniture beneath embroidered curtains. “The holiday always sneaks up on me so fast,” the woman said to her companion.
“It is hard to imagine it has been nineteen years” he replied. Having finished the last of my macchiato I flipped two more pages from Roberto Calasso’s The Forty-Nine Steps, then made my way to the counter. “What’s the occasion?” I asked the cashier.
“Excuse me?”
“Is today some sort of holiday?” I clarified.
“Today is the anniversary of the regaining of Estonian independence,” he politely informed me.

The overcast had parted and the cobblestone plats was bathed in sunlight. Unsatisfied with the findings of the previous day’s excursion I began my second walk about the town, this time in exploration of the south side of the river. On Narva Street I passed some massive dorm buildings nearing the Konsum market, then crossed the Emajogi by the Lai Vene bridge onto the south side.

From the front entrance the botanical garden appeared to be nothing special, but upon further exploration I found that it continued quite a ways past my expectations. I followed its bending paths and exited the garden by a large steel gate at Kroonuaia Street, taking a left. At Jakobi I hung a right past Krooks, a metal bar with outdoor seating and wifi that has since become my favorite watering hole. From there I went up to Veski Street and took a left. I entered a far more picturesque sector of Tartu than the side I explored the day before. Here lawns were well maintained, old couples walked their tiny dogs, and it seemed the majority of buildings were occupied. Superficial factors such as these have never in the past determined my estimation of a city, but with the degree to which my doubts had run away with me it was relief to see the majority of the city was not in total squalor. With each additional kilometer it became more apparent this city is far from squalid.

Not far down Vaseki I hung a right and entered an increasingly green and treed area. The entire city is sprinkled with small parks, so I assumed this one would discontinue after a short while. Instead it seemed only to gain in splendor the further I walked. It dipped down and led me into a series of connected groomed ravines with trails running throughout and vistas with seating at each peak. One such trail led me past tennis courts toward a massive brick ruin of tall arches and stairs with many compartments. Originally a church constructed in the thirteenth century, it later became the university library, was eventually too small to house all the books, fell into disrepair during the northern war, and was renovated in the twentieth century and turned into a history museum. Forgive me for any factual inaccuracies. I passed Toome Hill, beneath which is situated what I gathered to be a pagan sacrificial stone. The side of the hill facing the stone is dug out and replaced by a rock wall. I am unsure what lay behind those walls… Beyond there I passed a wide variety of statues of great intellectuals of the University of Tartu and finally came to a flat area in the trees perched roughly above the Raekoja plats, where I began my excursion. Contrary to my impression of yesterday, from my new vantage point I felt more like I was in a Henry James depiction of bourgeois London than a Dostoevsky depiction of St. Petersburg. At the Rotunda in the middle of the green I took a seat and ordered the Ale. Coq grapefruit long drink, which for my readers abroad is a canned Alt Greyhound you can buy in any store for a buck-fifty. I sat back.

My unrealistic expectations about the city itself were effectively dashed after that day. Sitting beneath the canopy of leaves at the Rotunda, with each sip of my gin long drink I became more satisfied with my decision to move here. And yet doubt remained in the back of my mind, no longer about living conditions and the beauty of the city, but about academics. The Evergreen State College where I earned my bachelor of arts was by no means a first-rate institution, but there the interdisciplinary structure and liberal attitude allowed for enough leeway that any enterprising student could pursue and at length acquire whatever he or she was looking for. When it came to semiotics there was an admitted dearth of specialists at Evergreen, but there were enough professors and students involved in peripheral areas such as philology, translation, and literary theory, that I had always seemed to find satisfactory conversation. My main concern was that at the University of Tartu the real specialists would probably engage their studies in Estonian, and that the international students might not be serious enough about the topic to be willing to engage me at the level I desire. To be perfectly honest, all I really feared was that no one in Tartu would have read Foucault’s The Order of Things, the center of gravity in my current research. Having finished my long drink, I made my way down from the Rotunda, past all the undergrads gathered on the hill drinking, through Raekoja plats toward Raatuse 22 in preparation to finally meet M., my correspondent from abroad. She is a second year semiotics student and answered many of my questions about the program over email. We were to go out for a drink and she was to introduce me to some fellow semiotics students.

M. met me on the first floor of Raatuse 22 at seven-thirty. From there we walked toward the bridge and then into the plats. At the kissing students fountain she introduced me to S., a blonde long-haired Estonian with glasses. S. greeted us cordially and led us to Illegaard, perhaps my second favorite watering whole currently. I thanked her for all the assistance and encouragement she had provided from abroad. We went around the table introducing ourselves, I explained I’m from Seattle and that I found the university in an online search for semiotics programs in Europe, and so on. My curiosity overtook me finally and I had to ask, “So, what’s your focus area?”
“Oh, nothing in particular,” M. replied with a snarky smile.
“Aren’t you working on your dissertation?”
“Oh, yeah, but it’s not going too well,” she explained with little concern. My heart sank. At length she elaborated, “It involves the study of emotions in relation to Peirce’s sign system, but I’m beginning to realize I don’t know anything about Peirce.”
“That sounds interesting,” I continued.
“Eh, not really.”

Over time I have discovered M.’s level of dedication to be much higher than she was willing to demonstrate on the spot, but at this moment it seemed my fears about academics here might be well-founded. She got up to order a pizza and a coffee and I turned my attention to S.

“So what do you do around here in your spare time, S?” He gave the remaining beer at the bottom of the bottle a cursory swish as if to say, “this”, and finished his drink, but then went on.
“I used to play in a rock band but have recently transferred most of my energy toward school. The whole rock star thing was starting to get in the way.” He went on to explain that he is a drummer, that he sometimes still plays but doesn’t have a full kit. Again at a certain point I could not help but bring the topic of conversation back around to semiotics. “What did you write for your master’s dissertation? Who did you focus on?” I asked. S. first named a thinker I am totally unfamiliar with, then he said,
“…my main interest right now is Foucault.” Barely able to restrain my nerdy enthusiasm, I prodded for more details. “Which books in particular?”
S. elaborated, “I believe The Order of Things to easily be his most brilliant work.” After we finished our beers and coffees and pizza we continued on to two more bars and fairly late into the evening. I was still jet-lagged and had not eaten enough. Discussion oscillated between where the best place to buy beer in Tartu was and the inevitability of representation to disintegrate into simulacra without proper internal regulating mechanisms. My feelings oscillated too, between being on the verge of passing out and total euphoric bewilderment. In fact the two states may have fed each other. The bottom line was that I was dumbfounded. After all my time at Evergreen and all the talk of Foucault not a single person there had ever examined The Order of Things closely enough to have a real discussion about it, and yet the first Estonian I meet here personally is already challenging my contention about the increasing arbitrariness of the relation between sign and meaning between the renaissance and modern episteme…

I was left with two possible paths of interpretation after this evening. Either, one: The University of Tartu is a far better institution/Estonians are far more dedicated to rigorous discussion, than what I was previously accustomed to, or two: some strange gossamer network of fate has placed me here, delivered me from a state of intellectual and emotional destitution I thought for a while might be terminal, and that the accumulation of synchronicities I have experienced so far is merely an indication of the influence of this network on my life. At the moment I lean toward a synthesis of these two interpretations, am willing to relinquish the need for absolute definitions and try to relish the uncertainty that comes from the inability to reconcile the opposition of expectation and reality; an inability that I trust will continue to characterize my stay here for a long time to come.

Dream Combinatorics 3

1
We take a trip south toward San Francisco or is it London? Dermal contact with the substance enhances inter-dimensional dreaming. It rips the roof off my banquet hall, all of my dinner guests run screaming, and then reaches into the hall for me. By this token it makes sense our camp is at the bottom of the valley. Droves of people jog together under blaring sun toward the top of the mountain. In the bag I find not my books or my lap top but instead only a small glass cylinder, perfectly dry. He scales the tower to commit suicide every ten years apparently.

2
So we decide to relocate to a costal town  – is it Sandycove, Howth, or is it something on the west coast of the United States? It glows neon opaque. I must flee with the precious substance. About to take action against him, a beautifully plumaged bird flies from a nearby tree and perches on a branch right next to me. Something glitters beneath a shrub. I pick it up. It’s a tiny ruby shaped like a strawberry. The higher we climb, the more gems collect beneath our feet, mounds of perfect sapphires like grapes, and golden pineapples. I open one. Inside are scrolled up parchment documents. I unroll them and find a series of diagrams with measurements written in my hand, and then he looks at me. Where have I seen this clock tower before?

3
I return from my travels abroad with the glass cylinder full of viscous red ooze, then drop everything and dive into the group tent in search of my camera. Several more glitters in the grass indicate more of the unusual gem accumulations. I stand back up, and see that in fact they’ve accumulated all around the wicker dome. They all move together in one smooth combination of traditions, performing the dance with perfect accuracy. Disgusted by the display of degraded promiscuity around the campfire I retreat from the orange light, through the branches and trees, into moon light before an open clearing.

4
I’m not sure what the function of this ooze is, but I know it’s precious. Everyone around me wants to take it. At my first banquet in our new area of influence, the deity manifests as a five-story clock tower/windmill. Besides, the bird has already flown away. Our thoughts become more grounded. Down slope I see crowds of people making their way our direction. He drives us to the water front, then out onto the pier, and before I know it, we plunge over the edge into the water. At the other end of the clearing is a clock tower. There were others in the tub, or so I told her corpse, and defending my awkward approach I remind her, it’s my dream: polluted, violet midnight, starless landscapes.

Dream Combinatorics One

1
Back in the living room I see more red candles are lit and placed on the dining room table. The table is raised at the center like a spiral, draped by an embroidered white cloth, and there is a thin crooked brass tube shaped like a question mark dangling upside down from the ceiling, above the peak of the spiral. Beneath the tree there is a cabin, a woodland cabin high in the mountains owned by some wealthy entrepreneur. Agents storm all four stairwells of the abandoned apartment complex. The passage leads to the bottom floor of a many-storied warehouse. I slam the screen door shut and a swirl of desert sand blasts my face. In the final room of the underground complex we find a grandfather clock. Green helicopter search lights reflect off the wall of the next building over. The image of a map outlining the location of a series of costal towers and the track of an abandoned monorail  – with a deep sense of related urgency – fade from my mind, leaving me sickened. Impossibility within the dream serves as a doorway.

2
A pale blond man next to me attempts to answer my question. The ceiling seems higher than the roof indicated from outside. He will wait here at the shore for the tide to take him away. Boxes of electronics, hygiene products, snack foods, and other useless items fill the place, a testament to the age that brought this upon us. I doubt the bus lines are in service here anyway. At the ends of the chains hang a variety of keys, some skeleton keys, some car keys, some electronic chipped security keys. We move to the center of the building away from the windows. I am handed a drink. Preserving these unrealities is a method for reconnecting with the real.

3
Everyone here is an unrecognized part of you. Were you to come here more often you might know them better. She tells me, “The owners are upstairs sleeping.” The approaching storm is more intimidating than I expected. Staircases lead to catwalks suspended from impossibly high ceilings. I’ve tread this stretch before, though never in its entirety. The face of the clock is decorated not with roman numerals but glyphs of a sort I’ve never seen, arranged in circles within each other, like a barometer combined with a compass combined with a clock. They’ve cut the power, but our night vision has increased greatly since the collapse. Something in the color and lighting here dulls feeling and memory. Operation within conceptual systems conditions the acceptance of the absence of novelty.

4
I look to the faces in the room, who have all gathered in a circle around the spiral of red candles. I think of asking her why are you here, and isn’t this dangerous, but I am eager to explore the interior of the house. We see its churning black mass gaining strength off the coast. More car parts, entertainment systems, and now I see weapons of a completely unfamiliar make. A bus I might’ve caught roars by me without slowing. There are more than two hands on the clock, and they appear to rotate irregularly. Papers with complex diagrams are pinned all over the walls, scale models of contraptions I’ve never imagined, with measurements in a colorful pictographic language. “Just let it go,” my old history teacher councils me. Novelty characterizes unconditioned experience.

5
I can see each of their golden faces, I scrutinize them trying to recognize someone, to no avail. She points to the skylights above us where the ceiling meets the south wall. We ascend the slope, over the hill, across the interstate littered with abandoned cars. Time is short, but I want to climb a little higher to find some indication of where we are. It disappears against the horizon. After executing a complex adjustment intuitively, the face retracts into the clock, which retracts into the wall and disappears, turning into a doorway. I pull a book from the shelf and lay it open on the floor. I never liked him, but this place feels so much better than wherever I just came from that I decide to take his advice.

6
In a different state of mind you might find this place differently. “Do you see it?” she asks me. There is morbid pleasure in the advantage of independence our destitution allows us. Only after climbing too high do I realize I’ve tarried too long. Twilight turns to starlight. The doorway leads back into another room. It’s a vellum edition, hand bound, what looks and smells like a leather cover but embossed with a self-correcting illumined glyph that corresponds to the user. Unconditioned experience always presents itself as an impossibility.

7
The last candle is placed on the spiral and everyone raises their arms, pointing their hands toward the center and moving in a slow circle around it, humming loudly in harmony. The panels depict different horizons and constellations, mostly dark blues and purples. We move beneath overpasses we know not where as the first fingers of storm make shore. The stairs are far longer on the way down than I remember. I will not be making it to my destination. I lift the lantern. Sitting before the blank pages, we close our eyes, we come to somewhere in Europe. The seamless is unreal.

8
As the crescendo of humming around the glowing spiral approaches, it occurs to me this scene resembles similar ones in several of the most important dreams I’ve had. The image cast on the floor changes with the alignment of the panels. “Let’s go,” I rasp to the others still digging through obsolete knick knacks. I light a cream-colored candle and place it on the front steps for him. An ill gust of wind from nowhere extinguishes our light. The cities here are destroyed too, but we suspect fewer militias. “Shh!” I implore her. A rustling comes from the other room. A cloud passes over the moon. The image disappears. The mind reaches beyond the confines of conceptualization toward that which is unthought.

Combinatorics Two

1
I see carefully cultivated fields on terraced land and complex irrigation systems running throughout, and little wooden platforms decorate the ponds where the trail runs out. Only as I pass the doors of the mall do I remember, they’re oval shaped like eggs but larger, semi-translucent, and lined in rows like a carton, but they're not a full dozen. We take a seat near the entrance, having brought the camper into the dank valley and parked it a good distance from the gathering itself. She crumples back into the floor and falls asleep. She sees me I think but keeps walking. Where have you been? How could these delicate creatures ever expect to survive in the lower world? Behind us, many of those still moving down the trail stop to look up as the stormy black hole pulsates. I only barely touched the objects but my hands are already dried out and cracking from the contact. They’re not from here. Night turns to day and the stale taste of a wasted evening lingers on every beer can and smoldering cigarette. The sun is barely risen. The empty day-lit house is filled in this way with mostly unfamiliar people by night fall. It’s a grid laid out in colorful squares, each with its own inscrutable designation.

2
Outsiders begin to visit the sanctuary. The native creatures being so small have no difficultly maneuvering these obstacles, but I am not this character and this is only a movie. They’re also draped in a fine gauze or netting of gossamer, barely visible. The passage of people along the main trail is so rapid and chaotic I seek refuge in the camper and my father gives me a look of combined envy and ridicule. I call to her, asking are we still dreaming?! and then there is nothing but a long colorful train of sunshades and carts heading down the mountain, like some Tibetan convoy moving away from Lhasa. There is no way around their caravan on these narrow switchbacks. Then the singularity storm spews a black stream of wailing formlessness at the sanctuary in the clouds. I show him my hands. He turns back once to look at me and then he keeps running. So few familiar faces amidst the horde. I’m exhausted. It occurs to me again perhaps I’m still dreaming, but the abandon with which these people go about their evening is hued by a deeper despair. We see that each square in the grid beneath our feet corresponds to a period of our lives as well as a point in the development of mankind generally.

3
The natives’ appearance begins to change, and the human visitors are too heavy to step across the panels without grabbing on to the spiky stalks that grow out of them. Unfortunately, the roommates and friends I came with were just consumed by the storm. I’m tempted to handle them. She looks to me sympathetically, asks me “Where did your friend go?” Through these windows I can observe all that goes on outside. I scale the side of the truck with violent intent, then speak inarticulately to her about my dreams and how confused I am at the moment. His eyes are so blood shot, but I know he’s not drunk. Each dark spirit finds a person on the path, crashing into them. We move into the mall where before it was sunny, but now a mist settles all around, beginning to obscure my view. On our way out I wake the girl, but I don’t give it a second thought. In the middle of the largest wall of the house, in plain sight – I realize now it has been there all along – is a high-definition screen showing the same jumble of signals I’ve been hearing in my head. She moves from square to square describing our movement along the game board.

4
Slowly they begin to dismantle the sanctuary, preparing for an exodus. I wont let my fellow travelers rest or slow down though, as one, another, and then the last one, dearest to me, gets hit by the swooping banshee coming out of the storm, as I run to her yelling. They project a facsimile of their own spatial relation before the handler, a few feet in front of him. I didn’t notice before, but my friend has disappeared. Everything's reduced to indecipherable madness, a carnival of faces blurring together and passing down the main trail. Then I gain access to the cab where from above I can see a large red-haired man at the wheel. My disheveled state says more than enough. I leave the council and day breaks to the east. The magnificent sight of the singularity is paralyzing. I meet man along the way who doesn’t speak my language. She tries to pull me toward her. Cars pass by at great speeds for our quiet little neighborhood, cars of a sort uncommon in this bourgie suburb, fragmented unrelated sound bites at times, and then multiple overlapped signals. She reaches a particular square right in front of me and stops.

5
A small dark hole appears above the village, and only I know the horror that awaits the sanctuary. She transforms before my eyes into just another dull humanoid that evidently doesn’t remember me. Since it is much bigger than its model, the movement performed with the hands is sped up greatly and the projection shimmers and sparkles in shifting interrelations. A couple runs toward the exit. Having regained a little control I exit the vehicle. Ahead Denny avenue is blocked off by police. She’s not so interested in talking to me as she seemed when we had class together at Evergreen. On her trade blanket is a small rectangular box. I stand transfixed until the turtle man gently tugs at my sleeve. He seems to be the only one still willing to interact with a stranger. The broken down cars are shoddily repaired, I turn to a man next to me and ask him where are we? After a moment I ask her why it is we have not moved beyond this square.

6
He wears the white robe and bandanna of an apprentice. They put up protest, but I take off. I can see that my friend gets great pleasure from manipulating these silicon egg projectors. Then a few more. The side of the valley now has lights, electricity. We take a detour onto eighth, finding ourselves in an unfamiliar alley. Across the street at the baptist neighbors’ place a ruckus has broken out. Inside is a folded handkerchief with small rocks and gems around the edge. He offers me something in his hand, cars that are combinations of different models, driven recklessly by people I’ve never seen here. Why must that screen be there and why can’t we turn it off?!

7
He goes through each of the steps without the characteristic impatience of lowlanders, but where the black hole over the village was once small enough to ignore, now one of the evil creatures to the left is wearing a tuxedo. I try it out but only touch it briefly, not sure of the effect of such devices. People frantically run out of the building, then I see it’s actually just trees around a house. At the far end of the alley red and blue lights play on the bricks and people run toward us from there. He’s still not around, but I hear voices in the house. The price tag reads: one hundred dollars. Do I risk infection? He smiles and lights a red candle, placing it carefully on the dining room table.

8
I am so enrapt by the movie I consider using that last line as my next face book profile update. Now it looms huge, consuming the entire horizon, and everyone is eager to leave. I pass through nonchalantly, locating an exit, running toward home. Where before there were only the ones next to me on the curb, now I see they are growing everywhere across the mall parking lot; gossamer webbing slowly overtakes the place. The viral threat is finally announced over the intercom. But I still rent a room here! We run with them to the sound of voices I don’t know and a radio dial spun quickly. Then I offer her a twenty. She takes it.

9
Our descent is complicated by a series of long steep switch backs lined with the slow moving carts and wagons full of native creatures making their own escape attempt. The last bit of trail dissolves, the sky overhead zooms into a visible ceiling, and we are returned to our normal size. How did I become the character of this movie? But it’s just patches of eggs and gossamer netting all over the lot..? My motor cycle is parked out front, sirens are on all sides, and shadows also are cast on the wall like people, and then become people. I spread the numinous cloth I bought out beneath the shade of a low hung canvass desert tent, entering the next dream.

book=book–reading

The between point from book=book–reading,
becomes also, becomes refined nuances
also two, exactly current house of.
Of is stressed, appears simply itself, well
first either right, continue reading that
through the moving next, then indications
depict obscure tandem impossibilities
as to 1) characters and 2) the destinies.

These schematics grapple with
compelling methods of booking structure.
As it takes them, it notices, but thesis:
the aspects of the materiality of absence
postulate a distortion grid.
Behind it, exploratory discourses piece 

together new perspectives 

on poetic encryption
and dance through the splatter of submissignificts.
It defies imagining.

To the showing of the aftercourse of form,
of the three one–level re–volumes,
youtube idly mentions our own forays,
knowingly existent for
newer significtualidations. They might
revere long the stratified
descriptive symposium text-editions,
each more and ever-more
right vision honey.

Inscription springs free of the infirmary, bypassing
the static passages and other obstacles
from the degraded alphanumeric notecase.
The book of substance starts a fire in the gutter.
It lines up to incinerate the mean bonds.
Only novelty heaves a more collateral
payload overboard.