That place you have a murky nostalgia for, go there, go to the masters you keep dreaming of, find them in Quixote, Koran and Kabbalah. Look for the stumping Ahab, those many nights of stories, the sixty eyes glowing in one pine horse and learn the hearts that set them in motion. In the shade of deep libraries adjust your eyes and begin, but know that you must first conquer their readers to reach those you have dreamed of. Go, then, to the false land of crowded words and crowded heads if it be your home, if we are an elsewhere to you, go.
* * *
From that land of many dreams and few words I come, tired, eager to join you but unable to read your books in the thick and shaded basements of libraries, for how can I enter the world of your chanting texts with such bulk, how to read past the many readers right through to the signs gasping at the bottom, the mounds of you, your sticky words upon the words like the infinite number of points on a line those tin voices of your dingy schools celebrate? The dense much I can’t penetrate, the fear and sorrow, foolish rage and dead-man dumb I cannot pierce to find the souls I dreamed of in the nights of the elsewhere I’ve shunned. No ultraviolet tricks will do, no x-ray fluorescence. And I’m so sleepy.
Your years, hundreds and thousands gone by and your thoughts like billions of flies stuck to what once were pages, and no masters in sight, buried instead under the decayed wings of so many pale blue headstones. How to descend I wonder, for don’t you see I have no home but you?
In your pages with my faraway heart and buzzing words stuck upon those flies, I now am one of you. But what if I teach you to dream, I’ll teach you to dream, I will, dreaming myself to the bottom of your words, dreaming back up, breathing as I ascend, the warm wind dispersing those rancid things, clearing the way to a clean and quiet alphabet I once saw in the long-ago. Dream, you will, I swear, that I may call you home and live with you in somewhere, at the bottom of a once-upon-a-time mountain of flies. I swear.
This story appeared in Vol. 4.1 of Quiddity journal, and was featured on the Quiddity public radio program.
