Women of the Dream World
All icons are feminine and all women are icons
Women are at the center of my somnolent universe – sometimes drifting like the Mary Celeste,
sometimes slinking and sashaying like Josephine Baker – always leaving my dreams perfumed with
the comforting scents of tarts – and vamps and saints.
Off-handedly, my mother would say, "Today I’m looking at the world through blue eyes." She was telling me that she was happy. When she was not happy, she saw the world through (her own) brown eyes. Of course, not everything my mother told me was the gods’ unexpurgated truth. Her truth was flexible enough to accommodate the reality that not all brothers are monks and not all sisters are nuns.
A mother has a sad devotion to the fiction that her child would never deliberately disappoint: a delusion held tenaciously in the face of all objective evidence to the contrary. Every sorrow or care is born with cheery indulgence.
The women in my dreams are arbiters of propriety and instruments of revelation – protecting with gentle cautionary admonitions and chastising with weary, disappointed voices. Many are inscrutable Pietàs, understandable only when the music is playing backwards. Long suffering and little noticed, the martyrdom of these mothers and wives of the saints is uncelebrated. Others are sirens and somewhat more entertaining: temptation has an eastern European accent and oozes the charm of a Balkan countess fallen on hard times. Bejeweled, with bee-stung lips, they flirt and taunt. These saints and sinners are all conscious thespians in a play that defies time and has no sequence to the acts.
Every life is a collection of vignettes - an unstructured, unscripted, unprincipled morality play. Its accidental epiphanies and revelations are both incidental and ephemeral and, quite probably, completely beside the point. Dreams, on the other hand, must answer to an internal logic whose significance is revealed serendipitously in a relentless sequence of random concurrent synapses. You are admonished to pay attention, with the caveat that you pay no mind.
Never forget that salvation is always one act of contrition beyond reach and the scars of self-inflicted wounds are an ever-present history of stupid mental and moral lapses. Life is a game of skill and chance in which you pedals across chasms of mortifying uncertainty whistling bravely but out of tune. Never look down ...or back. That lump in your throat is the truth being difficult to swallow.
Even if time were to stop, the damage would have been long done. Even when a ghost smiles we can see the melancholy that lies leaden behind its eyes.