They had an idea, the dead, who happen to speak to me. I don’t mean the tedious ghosts of those who once lived here but mostly the ones with ideas. Over a large and famous cemetery I live, five stories up and far from home. The voices ascend quickly during the night and who knows why voices from the grave rise so much faster to us than an earth voice does to God? The language is French because I’m here in Paris.
Of course, the voices are sometimes quite stupid, as they no doubt were in life. This has nothing to do with the French because they are no more foolish than anyone else, adolescent drama and all, l’amour toujours, Sartre and Simone fouling Galois clouds with their rotten café breath and no-account ideas, and of course the beloved Jerry Lewis live on stage. No, the French are all right, I’ve learned from them and their ghosts, the smart ones, especially when they call up to me after midnight, with ideas. They can’t sleep either, they say, and yes, the dead need sleep and your world won’t shut up.
Alexandria, they say. Where we are it’s like living in that library, only with all the books broadcasting at once. No, I tell them, who knows how large that library was? Better to say the Library of Congress or the Internet. What difference does it make, they say, it’s a figure of speech we’re using, and to think, you make fun of the French.
Well, I’ve learned from them. That the dead too need sleep, dreams, soul refreshment. They’re smart, the dead French.
I met my Parisian pal at a favorite bistro, where I told my story. We drank through every shade of night and I forgot about the voices, no doubt waiting for me that very minute. She said she couldn’t sleep either but who does? No one sleeps nowadays, not even the dead, but that’s all right. Your smart dead friends are not that smart and maybe you should have listened to the dumb voices because this sleeplessness, well, someone is trying to teach us, teach us and the dead the poetry of wakefulness, how to dream without sleep.
There’s no poetry to that, I said, beauty is born in places without overhead blue or even stars and candles, it’s born in black on black.
That’s so old, Peter, and this is why we’re all awake, why graves rumble and voices rise from the deep to the living. Your smart dead should know this if we don’t. Poetry is written on the face of the sun, it’s born from a silly noonday song. You’ve been dipped in too many underground myths.
So I stopped talking to all dead French, listened to the sound of awake and finally set it to music. My friend died that week to go tell the smart dead what she knows. After each sleepless night I’ll try at noon to dream her back to that same café, with strong coffee in my gut and old tapes of Jerry Lewis live on stage, because I do love her and the sun will not permit anything else.
