Essay by Steven David Justin Sills

Artwork © Richard Spisak

 

Chapter 23

You would know, for you also are a captive on this rock caught in the inadvertent self-made groove of its movement in the fabric of space and time called an orbit. There you find yourself within this dream called a life that is part of this bigger thing called Life–it’s discrete elements struggling to survive, reproduce, and thrive here, and only this. Only this, in this dream, is the modus operandi; and you, imaginary friend, who are going through a divorce the way I seek connection when preferring to be alone, would know, for you also experience a tiring of endless strife, some, oh Restive Reprobate, that you yourself render when needing to counter boredom, and a sleep, dreams within the dream, better referred to as rearranged awakening.

You whom I met in an earlier chapter of life when I was merely a janitor–I am now both part time teacher and janitor, not that with the commodification of education, in which a teacher is more a recreational planner and clown than mentor, I would see much difference as one cleans up shit and the other produces it, have felt it too: something similar to the tugging of self from a grasping hand made of brambles. This hand that has arrested you and whose grasp you attempt to break is the force of cohesion; and the self, knowing the cohesion, the organism, to be a lie, seeks its own dissolution as a natural and logical corollary.

The suicidal inclination is there, my friend, Freudianly surreptitious in its depth as it may be, just as instinct is sublimated in the very fabric of modern society. It is in every man, irrespective of how fortunate he is or seems to be to most spectators. It is there, latent but active, in the innermost part of the mind that is tucked in the deeper recesses of the brain.

In your case, you too may think that as your dream, your nightmare, is recurrent it means something, but then if that were so wouldn’t the recurrent days of your life mean something? They are nothing but instinctual hunger– “I am amorous, all so horny, therefore I am”– and the avarice of your empty, solipsistic mind thinking that in the thicket of galaxies your tiny mass, your lubricious life, is all.

Thirty years in Asia have been reduced to the residue of general memories and even those are almost forgotten. Specificity is lost and like the 1587 lost colony of English settlers, I too in a year and a half have assimilated into this indigenous Hawaiian-American tribe and in the trauma of such a metamorphosis I too am inclined to think recurrent dreams have special meaning in my innate foolishness like seeing an object of a certain color reflected from it and assuming it to be of that color instead of the colors it has absorbed.

Let me try to explain my dream, my rearranged awakening, if you cannot articulate yours. Although there have been variations, largely it is as though I find myself sequestered, as I have always been through the years of my life, but alone on top of Aloha Tower looking downward and yet somehow seeing threadfin and ornate butterfly fish intermingling among yellow and convict tang. Startled by the color, having always presumed fish to be grey, and preoccupied in wondering whether the perception of beauty within the intense color is devised by the mind to achieve harmony in a world of strife, or perhaps because the death wish takes over, I stumble and fall from the parapet and land onto pavement around a canal in Bangkok floundering like one of its fish when pulled out of sordid waters. Then I think:

What am I now? Dead, yes. Ghost, I can’t believe. A 16 week graduate class–Charles Darwin’s works it was–ended that…that always anodyne, and anodyne always a delusion. But not only this as in life a life experiences plentiful unpleasantries to which no divine intervention, the potency of prayers notwithstanding, alters outcomes. And it all taught otherwise. Memory, maybe. Maybe in the last seconds of dissipating energy before my death I became memory.

Before, in childhood it was as if the patchwork of multi-colored billowing clouds, dark but nuanced in density and darkness, ripped and a bit of the rip tide of light imbued through. But the dark clouds were always there, always above, coalesced as ceiling that was permanently rolled over to sleet dapper daggers of hail onto me. Every day as a boy I had to dodge the bullets fired in quick succession. A machine gun’s magazine, they were, and I would run away from the derision of family. On my bicycle I rode off into empty fairgrounds and learned to live in my own company.

What is this sound? Is it the hiss of Hawaiian wind through metallic fence around a tennis court near Waikiki Beach, the cold wind wafting around Seoul Tower and the four Korean kingdoms that are in a square radius from each other, the sound of traffic beneath the Laotian version of the Arc de Triomphe, that chirping sound of pedestrian lights in Niigata Japan, the waters of the ferry boat taking me to Penang Malaysia, the rustling sound of the skirts of Indonesian children-beggars dancing to the music of their speakers in stalled traffic, or a crazed nude woman’s large bosom flopping as she runs in a Jakarta park while trying to escape the rain? Maybe it is the Indonesian rain itself or its ladyboys clicking their way toward me. “Hello Sir”, they say. It matters little. It is gone now.

Now where was I? Oh! Then the sun came out in my teens. American literature of the Romantics, which I read voraciously, sang to me. In my twenties I began to publish poetry in reputable magazines and a book published by a professor at Towson State University in Baltimore followed suit. I called it An American Papyrus and I thought from it it would shoot me to literary fame and that I would soar like one of the Romantics. I was wrong. I wandered the earth as far from family as a man can get and still be on the planet. I continued to write. I thought maybe I was like a Bodhisattva in my writings. Now I seem to be energy moving through various libraries looking for people who might pick up my book, but there is no one, and all copies are dusty on library shelves. No one comes to pick me up. Maybe I am a ghost. Isn’t it horrible? Isn’t it horrifying?

That is the dream. But that very dream, as much as nothing in actualizing adventitious happenings, is something to the protective carapace known as self. A nugatory dream like this is an admission of trepidation that the self is irrelevant, which it of course is. And you have them too in different ways as well, responding to them accordingly, although perhaps not rationally. If you increase gregariousness, accentuate appetites– “I fuck therefore I am” (base instincts are our foundation and few rise beyond them, with hobbies, interests or tastes defined as pleasures, dispositions, and identifications shaped almost entirely on sexual proclivities and other nagging hungers), and increase one’s noise in boisterous groups to magnify the size of the illusion exponentially (a self projected off of various personalities is like a house of mirrors) , the consequence is always the same. It will increase the potency of such dreams. No, one must diminish, diminish to something less than dandelions and dust. Only then can one be sanguine in the sanguinary, and something in one’s nothingness. Sorry, I would invite you in for coffee. I do have coffee, but fortunately or unfortunately, I no longer have a self.

 

Steven Sills Steven Sills is a writer living in Honolulu Hawaii. There he teaches at language schools and works as a janitor. His M.A. is in great books of the Western canon.

Richard Spisak began his artistic career as a light artist in the Lumonics Studios of Mel Tanner, a legendary Light Artist. After serving under Jack Horkheimer as a planetarium operator at the Miami Space-Transit Planetarium, he left to begin traveling with Lumist Kenvin Lyman, whose show Dazzleland Studios traveled across America. Richard later worked as a Laserist with LASERIUM and Laser Productions, served as a technical producer for the festival company PACE Concerts, and later as operations Manager and Senior Producer at WWHP and WTCN-TV in Stuart Florida.

Richard writes for Theatre, TV, radio, and the web. He published two short story collections, Two Small Windows, in a Pair of Mirror Doors, and Between the Silences. Followed by his poetry collection 7370 Allen Drive and the recently released STONE POETRY. Richard also produces “POETS of the East,” a televised webcast featuring poets from across the globe.

 

Chapter Guide

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty- One
Chapter Twenty-Two