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Headage Map of Dreams Once there was a long-haired, overfair leaping gnome, who had a synthesizer, a 12-string electric-acoustic guitar, some freaky effects pedals and a four-speaker stereo system. He holed up in a stolen room in a New Jersey suburb with a bong, some bong-stuffing, and a couple of sheets of ant-acid (no, really--the blotter paper had a little ant on each square, all on a spiral march towards the center of the sheet). He played psychedelic quadraphonic guitar and far-out New Age electronic tuneage. He put the Major Arcanas of four different Tarot decks up on the baseboard heater-grimed walls. He made a pagan altar out of the thick cross-section of a pine tree that had been growing in a cemetery, burning a cardinal circle and the phases of the moon into its smooth-sanded top, and finishing it off with a dark stain from Minwax. He slept on a mattress on the floor and, later, on a much more comfortable massage table. He hung out with people who believed in energy and light and the power of pendulums. He sat in circle with these people and mispronounced Lakota Sioux words. He smoked a peace pipe. He sweated in sweat lodges, learned reflexology, and went to massage school. He was going to be a healer. That leaping gnome was me, of course. Lately, I've wondered where he's gone off to. I have made a map of the geography of my dreams, and I carry it in my head. I plot new locations on it as I come across them while I sleep. It resembles a map from the front pages of any one of a dozen fantasy paperbacks, all emulating Tolkien's maps of Middle Earth: thickly-lined, with trackless empty spaces and blunt iconography for mountains, rivers, and cities. My dreamscape map is colorful, a bit cartoonish. Each individual place on it is represented by a little caricature, with tiny structures or natural features. Towards the bottom are the fields and forests that I've been to in my sleep, each reminding me of some location near my childhood home. Off to one side is the strange house I visited twice several years ago, dark on the inside, with the coruscating neon walls and the strange, feminine essence in the closed room at the top of the stairs. A bit to the right is another odd house I've visited, the Frankenstein-Victorian up on stilts with the oddly tacked-on additions and the cats in the windows. There are many other places...landscapes, strange vistas, towns, or sometimes just a nebulous area that appears different each time I visit, but occupies the same space on the map. Real places--like my house, or my old apartment--usually don't merit a place on the map. It's the symbolic places, the deep and mythic locations made up from my own self and mind, that end up there. I've been adding to the map for many years, now, and I can usually take it with me while I sleep. There are only certain types of dreams in which I can consult the map--resonant dreams, in which I'm partially aware that I'm dreaming. Often in those dreams I'm able to plot a given location in relation to the other places I've been. My map is incomplete, like an early eighteenth-century cartographer's depiction of the East coast of America, where the Western shores of China are just beyond the narrow, imagined shore of the ocean that has replaced the rest of the continent. But my dreamscape map's incompleteness conveys a sense of progression, a journey that my sleeping self undertakes continuously, even while I am awake. I find that there's a new place on the map, now, towards the top...a city of broad avenues and sprawling plazas, bounded by water, and dominated by either two shimmering towers or a vast, ruined crater in the ground. It is the dreamscape equivalent of what I witnessed that day, and of what I saw again and again for months afterward as the workers carried away the wreckage, truckload by truckload, and as they reverently bore the bodies of the fallen out of that charnel pit. I visited that place again a few nights ago...wandering along the impossibly wide, pale-bricked plaza that surrounds those towers, looking up at their sheer-walled height and knowing that I needed to get away from them, quickly, now, before It happened. And then, transported by winged dreamfeet, I watched from a distance as the first tower, no bigger than my outstretched thumb, crumbled in isolation, surrounded by no other buildings. I watched it reassemble, a film run in reverse, then crumble and reassemble again, the shattered walls rising and reknitting, the plume of smoke sucking itself back into the tower like the inhalation of a Sophisticated Smoker. It was as though someone was jogging the shuttle on a video editor, back and forth, back and forth. Moving on dreamfeet once more I found myself among the wreckage with the recovery workers, walking along unsteady piles of ruined beams and shattered desks. The wreckage tumbled away from beneath me, and I was hanging from the side of the pit, which was made of cinderblock. The blocks offered a good grip, and so I hung there above the ruins, my feet dangling over empty space...frightened, but not overly so, because the rough surface provided such a strong handhold. It's a truism that our idealism fades as we grow older...or, at least, it's supposed to, as the rough edges of the world bang up against us and wear us down. Many of those in my parent's generation tried to buck that trend and failed, but many others succeeded, and managed to transform idealism for idealism's sake into a worthy pursuit in our culture. As a result, there are many shouting in our public square today who are crippled by a privileged inability to apprehend the base, evil parts of human nature, and are at such a loss when truly confronted by that darker nature that their idealism becomes a deaf, dumb, and blind shield raised against unpleasant reality. Recently, I purchased an acoustic-electric six-string guitar (see left), and a nice amp to go with it (see left again). I've played guitar since 1991, but for the past five years or so I've concentrated on playing with sophisticated electronic instruments of one kind or another, and also dabbled a bit with trumpets. But I could never sing while playing the keyboard. I could make cool noise--with a beat, even--but nothing that made me want to make my own noise, with my own throat. I purchased my trumpets on the strength of dreams, wherein music flowed from my breath and sounded out loud and vibrant. But the reality of the trumpet was an aching diaphragm and buzzing lips, with the silver tones of Chet, Miles and Louis far out of reach. But the guitar...man, I can bang on that. I can strum and chuff-chukka-chuff! and I can sing while I'm doing it. I used to sing alot of songs with lyrics like For the children and the flowers I wrote that down from memory, because it's a song I grew up with. So, when I wrote my own songs, they contained lyrics like As a child When I strummed my new Martin guitar, rediscovering the instrument, I played the songs I grew up with, and the songs I had written. I discovered a peculiar thing. Not only did my soft uncalloused fingers hurt, but my voice wouldn't reach the notes I used to be able to reach, full-throat. I've got a good voice. I've got excellent pitch, I know how to breathe, how to set my vocal cords spinning, how to project my tones to the walls and fill whatever space I'm in. But time and again, I couldn't hit the notes, because my throat would close and tremble, and my eyes would well. It wasn't because I was out of practice. And it wasn't only happening with the old songs I grew up with--it was happening with the songs I wrote in my early twenties, when I had hair down to the middle of my back, participated in ceremonial observances of the new and full moon alike, and owned an athame. I started creating my dream-map when I realized that I was visiting places more than once in my dreams. It seemed a natural thing to do: to keep track of where you are, you need a map, or a GPS. GPSs weren't readily available to consumers in the early Nineties, and too complex to tote about in the dreamscape. A simple parchment map, rolled up, and tied with a strip of leather, is what I needed, so that's what I created. Likewise, the songs I wrote were simple things, words of little moment that carried the melodies that were meaningful to me, and felt good to power with my breath and my throat. One night last week, as I struggled to sing the familiar songs inherited from my mother (such a fan that she has a cat named John Denver) and to sing the songs I had derived from that inheritance...it hit me. Struck me dumb. The realization--as so many insights are, in my life--was assisted by liberal draughts of wine. But I stomped down the steps, and plomped onto the couch, and tried to explain to Pea--faithful companion and all-around understanding soul--what was wrong. Later, she told me she saw it on my face: I wore such an odd expression as I came down the stairs, she said. I began by trying to talk about Homer's account of Troy, and of battles fought more than three thousand years ago. About war, and the continual, senseless violence of men, and the differences between the City of War and the City of Peace that Hephaistos had forged into the new shield of Achilles. About how humanity has learned nothing, in all that time since the Argives tumbled into the dust of the plains of Ilium. But then, with choked words that tumbled forth--words that I cannot remember, now--it spilled from my guts: what I was actually upset about. How could they do that? How could they kill to take control of those jetliners? How could they pilot them with such cold intent? Knowing that they would kill thousands...hoping that they would kill tens of thousands? I dissolved into a drunken, shuddering mass of tears: They broke me. They broke me. It felt as though all within me that reached the high notes, all of me that sang of flowers and of peace and of the sappy, simple things of my youth, had been crushed out of me on that day, tumbling down with the towering columns of dust, mixing with the smoke of burning metal and the persistent scent of taffy-twisted corpses. And, most heinous of all: those fuckers put Mordor on the map of my dreams. Right there at the top, a place that I didn't create...a place of fire and smoke, of charred steel and death, a place that I know I will occasionally visit for the rest of my life. I feel as though I have gained a better understanding of those who cling so fiercely to ideas like there is no way to peace: peace is the way, and who believe so desperately in the mystical notion that somehow, thinking good thoughts and visualizing white light can change the world, and those who can't wrap their minds around the notion that war is often a necessary precursor to peace. I understand why there are so few actors, artists, and singers who support the campaign in Iraq. Certain forms of creative expression--whether they happen on stage, in front of a canvas, or behind a guitar and a microphone--are intimately linked with innocence. They come from a childlike place within us, where the world rarely intrudes. They fill us up, and lend us power. It's magic, almost by definition: the art of causing change in accordance with Will. The change that is created is the creation itself; a melody in the air, an image, or a set of words that wasn't there before, something that is newly-existent through our efforts. The rush I sometimes feel when reaching for the good melody is the same rush I used to feel when grabbing for the Holy Spirit in my old church, or when I sat in circle banging on a drum to bring in the four directions or draw down the moon. That sense of connection to what is outside myself, that soul-deep belief that I can effect change in the world, is also what drives many of the creative idealists who speak so loudly for peace, love and understanding. The nineteen men who killed three thousand Americans on September 11 believed that, too. They, too, sought to effect change in accordance with their wills, and their sacrificial magic spilled thousands of gallons of human blood onto an altar that was 1,000 feet high and sixteen acres in area. That kind of magic doesn't respond to good thoughts. It can't be countered by peace. Its practitioners aren't swayed by drawing down the moon, banging on drums, or reciting angry, righteous poems. It's Black Magic, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. It sweeps away all notions of personal creative impact. It strips the individual self bare, and exposes its futility. This is what drives the rage of the reflexively anti-war. What to do when practitioners of the evil arts expose your impotence? You can either reassess your role in the order of things, or you can scream out loud and shudder with denial, seeking to have an impact on something...anything. Anything to protect your fragile, childlike self from the reality of a savage world. Anything to prevent evil from making its own place in your dreams. I don't blame them, not one bit. The death of innocence--real innocence, deep innocence, the kind that is blissfully unaware of true, vicious evil--is painful and frightening. Trust me; I know. So do many, many thousands of others, who abruptly learned it with far greater clarity and force than I. This, then, is my great challenge. I must find a way to bring forth anew the creative soul within me, the one that sings the high melodies, and I must find a way to do so within the context of a world populated by evil sorcerers who would kill me, set me on fire, and dance around my smoking corpse singing Allahu akbar. This is also my great fear...because I haven't got the slightest idea of how to begin.
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