even if it has gone
up ten dollars and all he reads
are the obits anyway.
Cathy across the street loves it,
and when Mike comes down the mountain
Tuesdays for coffee, he takes
the paper back up to Donna
who uses it to line
the cages of her cockatoos.
She plunks out a tinny London Bridge
and a Do, Re, Mi that’s flat,
but my son is in love with the neighbor
girl’s tricycle, and there ain’t nothin’ I can do.
Yesterday, he rode her down the hallway, music blaring,
skid her hard into his bedroom then
drew black-out curtains,
so no one would ever know.
When I asked him when he would return it
he shrugged cool as Jimmy Dean. Said,
Keep it real quiet-like. On the down-low, ya know?
And maybe I’ll take you for a ride.
Nueva is a Janus-faced fairy whose smiles contradict.
When you were born, she sculpted lips as plump and pink as ripe grapefruit
and lined your eyes with shimmering blue dust—
reached down to you with tapered fingers
and turned up the end of your nose, just a bit.
Sable brush in hand, she drew two elegant arches on your brow,
someday to ruin a winsome boy
and worry a loving father.
Then Nueva turned, showing the face that looks to the past.
She considered me, taking in the bygone of my being
and a smile of regretful malice played at her lips
as she painted under my eyes with kohl,
made my breasts heavy and dolorous, and emptied me–
like any old plastic sack.
Then she flew away and left us To You
filling me up, And Me
raising you up
Before I knew what a millimeter was, I could discern it wanting
in my share of the Milky Way.
She who claimed the other portion had wings of golden hair,
a Shawn Cassidy silk jacket,
shoes that announced her arrival and
almost breasts.
I was the pleasantly practical sort,
brown in corduroy and brogues
heavy rubber soled, quiet,
for stealing Grandpa’s Pall-Malls,
a twenty from Grandma’s pension–then
walking around town as if
no one would notice
two ten-year-olds smoking.
My accomplice–the girl at whose urging I stole–
the person with whom I fought over a hair’s breadth of chocolate,
floated away on a ten-speed–cherry red with curling grips–
unpunished
My mother yelled Where did you get this money
and Why do you smell like smoke
and I choked out a snot-soaked story, painful
from my flat chest.
All these years later I wonder about her,
Do what sounds offensive and IS–I Google her–
to parse the particulars of injustice, to know how much
of the Milky Way she got.
I sit on a deck overlooking a garden in Santo Domingo
Chile filled with plants I cannot name.
I close my eyes and recognize rushing–despite
the softness of the breeze
I learned the sound in a hillside graveyard
where every Memorial Day until I was 12, I
mounded flattened earth and replaced plastic
flowers Grandma bought at Sprouse-Reitz
The air those 31st days of May
was redolent with sage and dirt and all
the dry implications of Western Nevada,
though we were in California
We carried ice water in Mason jars topped with a bit
of waxed paper to keep the seals from leaking
and we had bologna, cheese, white bread and mayo
because one must not only mourn
While mother and I ate, my grandparents
sat by the grave of their stillborn son,
speaking to him in Washoe,
the language and people I left.
One day, I will take my Chilean children
to that cemetery on the hillside where they
will put their hands in the earth
to help me tend my dead
For now, I must get up from this deck chair
and go to prepare for my family
something to eat
My mind is a mess. There’s too much going on inside of it. There’s too much worrying about Chile and its social upheaval, too much worrying about the US and its social upheaval; too much reflecting on watching my aunt die; too much reflecting on the death of my mother-in-law as her agony unfolds in the next room. The questions are always these: Am I helping you die or helping you live? Is it both?
I once heard there’s a microbe at the bottom of the ocean that has been there since the beginning of time. The man who said these words also said that we trade consciousness for death. Lately I’m warming up to consciousness, so I accept death, if I don’t exactly celebrate it. (There are those that do. Check out the burning in Santiago and Portland if you don’t believe me.)
Niall Ferguson is an historian that I sometimes follow. He says that when the printing press was invented, it caused a hundred years of fighting and that it makes perfect sense that we are now fighting because of this new way that we have of communicating. Plus, let us not forget, the job of the black boxes is to figure out how best to make us stay on whatever the social media site in order that we will buy, buy, buy. Meanwhile, China trains its technological power on surveillance that makes Orwell’s 1984 almost cute.
A hundred years of fighting. Is that what we have to look forward to? I’ve only got about 25 or 30 more, if I’m lucky. And I have these children to raise and this house to clean and an ill mother-in-law.
Who is going to save the republic? Can she be saved?
When I was little, I lived on a reservation on the California side of the Nevada/California border. When we moved there I thought that we would be one big, happy family, my tribe and I. But, no. It turns out that this was the place that I learned that lies spread more quickly than truth. This is where I learned what back-stabbing is. I learned about humans.
Critical Race Theory is Patronizing Horse Shit.
I am not Sainted Victim, the post-modernist’s new and improved Noble Savage.
I am sorry for every human being who ever lived.
We bear up under unspeakable things.
We are lifted by blessings that arrive from the sky.
If America must die, I hope that I am able to hold a place for her and that I help her to pass gently. And if she still has a fighting chance, God grant me the wisdom to know what best to do to save her.
I contemplate what to wear. Cotton shorts? Too tight. Black linen, elastic waist pants? Probably too hot for the noonday heat, but cooler, anyway, than sweat pants.
I put on my sneaks, slather on sunscreen and pull my hair through the back hole of a ball cap. The bill dips deeply over my left eye and I say to myself, as if there were another person in the mirror in front of me, “She looks like a matronly pirate.” Today, apparently, I am not only a matronly pirate, I am someone who talks to someone else in the mirror about this fact. I am triune.
Martin de Zamora, the thoroughfare nearest my home, is empty on a Sunday. Chileans are late sleepers, and I’m glad of it, because I look a sight. Once, a long time ago, I recall, I owned athletic wear. I passably pulled off Spandex.
I’m at the first corner, maybe a hundred steps from my house, when I can no longer walk. There’s pain in my groin. Pain just above my coccyx too. It goes away if I stand still, but I cannot step forward.
I stop at a street lamp; rest my hand against it and pull my left leg up behind me to do a quad stretch. The pull on my ankle hurts from a fall I took in September. I loosen it with some ankle turns. Quad stretch done, I walk.
Jordan Peterson says to take care of yourself as if you were someone you cared about, which is the reason I am out for a walk right now–fakin’ it ’til I make it, so to speak.
It’s hot, but not Bakersfield hot–which means it’s endurable as long as I take small, slow steps.
A man comes toward me with the smallest dachshund I’ve ever seen. I think it’s a puppy at first, but when I get closer, I see it’s grey around the muzzle.
There’s a house on this route that doesn’t have a high fence around it, just a small wooden gate on a low brick wall, and I think it must be the only one I’ve ever seen in Santiago. I wonder, Why aren’t they afraid? Deep in a fantasy about rooftop snipers, I glance upward at the gables of their house.
Down the street, a block away, I see a woman my age with metallic orange hair and a portly body like mine standing on a corner. At her feet a cat lies on its side, unmoving. The woman’s face twists and she lifts a fisted hand to her mouth. I don’t know if she is the cat’s owner or a woman who is struck, as I so often am, by the fragility of life, but I do know that she won’t mind if I take her in my arms and hold her while she cries.
I feel the weight of her as she rests in my embrace. She cries on my shoulder and I pat her metallic orange hair.
Bright fluorescent light. Perfumed air. Young men and women darting from cosmetics counters. Happiness? they ask. Love? Sex? Try the new scent by Jacques Blah-Blah-Blah.
No, gracias, I say as I wag my index finger.
Laura, my precious adolescent walks beside me.
This is fun, right, Mom? Just us two?
Yep. Fun, I say, as we step onto the escalator.
I’m wearing a dress whose bodice comes up high so as not to show my craggy, sun-stroked chest. The Sleeves are 1/4 length capped because sleeveless is no longer an option. I am concerned, however, about the leg action. The dress might be a little too short for the reality of my thighs.
Here comes the mirror that lines the escalator. Prepare yourself, Danette: Do you look or don’t you? And if you do, can you be discreet enough that others won’t see you? Or should this be the time when you say, To Hell With It, and give yourself a good lookin-over?
This is fun, right, Mom?
Here’s the mirror. I steal a glance at the hemline.
Mom?
We step off the escalator and I see nothing but grey trousers. Grey trousers short. Grey trousers bold. Grey trousers in the pot, not-yet-sold.
Where are the skirts?
Una consulta, I say. The woman behind the counter lifts her eyes to me. De la vuelta, she says, and indicates with her hand that we should Go Around the large column in the center of the store. Laura and I are De-ing the vuelta for five minutes when we finally run into another customer service representative. Una consulta, I say again.
A ver, the woman says, which means, Let’s See–apparently because she doesn’t know whether or not a shipment of five thousand pleated grey skirts is somewhere hanging in her department.
She leads us back to the sea of trousers. I want to say, Ma’am, if there were a skirt to be found in this section, I would have found it, but I don’t know how to construct a sentence in Spanish combining the second and third conditionals, so I look back at her as blankly as she looks at me. Gracias, I say.
Now we’re on to shirts. Standard white, long-sleeve button-downs come wrapped in clear plastic. The collar is supported with a hard plastic card and the shirt itself is held together with fifty million straight pins. I check to see if there’s a shirt in my daughter’s size that is hanging free of wrapping. No luck.
I cross the sea of trousers to the cashier. Can I open this package? I say.
There’s some open already, she says.
Not in my daughter’s size, I say.
She looks at the package, no doubt contemplating the pins, then looks back at me. Shrugs her shoulders. Probablemente, she says.
Laura finds a new style of shoe that she likes, but I can see the hard shiny “leather” is going to hurt her feet. I pick up the shoe to flex test it. See? I say. Hard as a brick.
Laura agrees: Let’s go to Be Quiet Dogs and see if they have better shoes.
We walk in the store and see three women behind the counter. We pick up a shoe right next to the entrance that is similar to the brick from the other store. It passes the flex test, so we decide Laura should try it on. She holds the shoe up and catches the eye of one of the women. The woman beckons my daughter across the room. The woman deigns to look at the shoe. Says, Just try that one on. It’s in your size.
Outside the store Laura gives me her hand and says, This is fun, right, Mom?
I catch sight of myself in a mirror and determine that a diet is in order. I squeeze my daughter’s hand. Yes, honey, this is fun.
Hit (Part 2)
I sat, feet up, in a cushioned chair with a matching footstool. Jen sat across from me with her legs crossed, her writing tablet in her lap and her pen poised.
“Tell me the dream in the greatest detail you can remember,” she said.
When I was done, she asked me to sit on the stool. “You are the young man now,” she said. “Why are you in the crowd? How did you come to be there?”
“I don’t know why I was attracted to this crowd. I only know that I felt lonely and I wanted to be a part of them.”
“How did you come to be lying on the ground?”
“I was made weak by joining the crowd. I lost my power and I couldn’t stay conscious. I fell down onto the ground.”
“What do you have to say to Danette?”
“Thank you for saving me. I owe you my life.”
Then Jen asked me to return to my chair. My eyes were closed the whole time, so the distance was just a scootch. (Best not to have therapy clients falling in session.)
“Danette,” Jen said, “is there anything you want to say to the young man? Turn toward him. He’s still there on the stool.”
“Don’t you ever do that again!” Tears slid down my cheeks. “Of course you were made weak by following the crowd.”
There was movement in the room, Jen moving another chair while I sat with my eyes closed. Then she moved me to a new seat. Now I was the old man.
Jen said, “Why were you kicking the young man?”
“Because I hate him,” I said.
“Why?” pressed Jen, as she handed me more tissue.
“Because he’s so beautiful. Because he has his whole life ahead of him–and because–I’m going to die.”
The premise of this kind of therapy is that each character–in fact, each and every thing that presents itself in the dream, is some manifestation of the psyche. I discovered that I have a weak young man inside of me who wants to be accepted, who wants to follow the crowd. I discovered that I have a murderous old man inside of me who is driven by envy and hate, and who is RE.LENT.LESS. You may recall from Hit (part1) that he was able to come back on the attack even after I had destroyed all of his body but his head.
Jen said, “What can you do to throw your old man a bone? How can you make him feel better?”
“I have to exercise,” I said. “I have to make him feel better in his ageing body, even if it won’t stop him dying. He will feel cared for, at least.”
This is what Jung called integrating the shadow. You take the dark parts of your psyche and you set them on a path toward the good.
By coincidence (if you believe in coincidence) at about this time, I stumbled into Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who is eclectic, but who leans heavily on Jung. I found him because I heard people screaming from the left wing that he was an evil conservative. Since I don’t like to be told who my enemies should be, I investigated him and I found a conservative, but I did not find an evil one. Instead, I found someone deeply concerned about the human animal, whose only motivation is to help.
Dr. Peterson makes a compelling case for the Biblical stories as archetypes, the stories of humanity distilled to their essence. As I’ve been working through my dreams, I’ve been applying what I’ve learned from the lectures in order to help me understand what the dreams are trying to reveal.
Recently, I dreamed that I inherited two things from my Native American ancestors. I inherited an enormous basket, which is the symbol of my art, of family ties, and of culture. With its gentle curves and open mouth, it is fecundity, itself. It is the feminine.
I inherited a bow, which is the representation of the masculine. It is a symbol of aggression, in as much as it is used to take life. More importantly, it is the tool with which I am able to take aim, to direct myself.
Both items were being kept in a museum of sorts. (This is the second time a museum has been featured in my dreams. In my first dream, inside of a museum was where I almost killed the old man.)
Here’s why I was disturbed by the dream: I couldn’t take responsibility for my inheritance. I understood that the objects were so valuable that it would be better to leave them in someone else’s care. Worse, I considered selling them for cash.
I ultimately decided that the objects weren’t for sale, but that they would have to stay in someone else’s care until I got my life sufficiently together so that I could be responsible for them. Then, just as I was leaving the museum, someone tried to steal the bow. A member of the staff and I were able to get it back.
Then, as dreams so unaccountably do, it switched to a scene where I was with a guy I know who suffers terrible body odor. (NUTS!) And I was consulting him about selling the shell of a large unidentifiable object about the size of a microwave oven. “You’ll only get a few bucks for it,” he said. “Yes, I said. But I don’t care. It’s just the shell. It’s not the essence. It’s okay to sell it.”
I really need to get back to Jen to untangle this one, but on the surface, it seems to me that leaving others as caretakers for what is rightfully mine–not accepting responsibility for them–is just as dangerous as taking them on in my imperfect way. Remember that the bow was almost stolen even when it was under the care of the museum, which is institution and dead society.
The basket (my songs, my writing, my feminine aspect, my tribal connection) and the bow (my masculine aspect, my aggression, and the Thing Which Permits me to Aim) are for me to care for. And the things that really matter are not given their worth according to the prices they can fetch. The dream says, “Sell the empty shells of things if you like, but don’t expect much from them. For the things that really matter, care for them. And then pass them down.”
Yesterday, as I was walking, a thought shook loose about the bow that I hadn’t realized. Jordan Peterson reminded me in one of his lectures that the definition of sin is “to miss the mark.” I started to weep when I realized that I would be missing the mark every single time if I didn’t even have my bow.
In my most recent dream, I was on a campus of sorts, but it was an open campus where different people could come and go. There was a man there, about 65 years old, average height, fat and balding, who had planted explosives somewhere under the campus. We all knew that he had done this and students were running hither and yon in a total panic. I had a gun in my pocket that I was trying desperately to hide. I remember thinking that I would just die if anyone found out that I carried a gun. But the darn thing was really hard to hide and it was stressing me out.
I went to the restroom and when I came out, I had my pants on backward, and the pocket was all twisted, and that made it even harder to conceal my gun.
On my way out of the bathroom, I ran into two people, both male, who attended a song-writing workshop with me in New York. I don’t remember what they said in the dream, but I asked them in my conscious state and they said, “We’re here to learn, just like you.”
I was able to get close to the man who was threatening to blow everything up. I was right behind him and I tried with all my might to pull out my gun to shoot him in the back of his balding head, but I couldn’t do it. I was scared to death that the crowd would know that I had a gun. More importantly, I was scared to use my gun because it only had little .22 cartridges and I was afraid that if they weren’t enough to kill the tyrant that it would only make the situation worse.
Then, scene change. The man was standing on a stage, looking down onto a parking area where he had drawn boxes on the black top. I knew in my heart that this way of ordering things was reminiscent of Hitler’s tactics. I knew that his tyranny would be an ordered one. I walked over to the first box and read the name that was written on it.
I can’t tell you whose name was written there. I’m sorry.
Then, scene change. The man was sitting across from me. I was on a bench with other people. I fell asleep. The man stole my gun.
I woke in the dream and I woke angrily. “Give me my gun,” I said. I now had courage. I knew that I could speak forthrightly about what was rightfully mine. I knew that even he had a kind of honor and that he would probably give it back to me.
And he did. But not before pouring the little .22 cartridges out into his hand.
So there’s another old man lurking inside of me. This one is not so old, but he’s bald and he’s fat and he has the impulse to destroy everything. He is a nihilist who is bitter at the world.
I asked him, as I lay in bed the other night, staring at the ceiling, “What do you have to say to me?” (In the dream, he never spoke to me.) He said, “You were afraid your power was insufficient to combat me. Perhaps it’s true that you didn’t have very much power, but at least you had some and it may even have been enough to vanquish me. Now, because you were not vigilant, and you fell asleep, all you have is a gun with no ammo.”
Reminds me of a saying by a wise man: To those who have nothing, even that which they have will be taken away. … a restatement of the Pareto distribution in economic terms … a psychological truth about not facing what you fear until you are so weakened by it that you have no resources left to combat it.
Did you notice that in the first and third dream that some aspect of my psyche “fell asleep”? In both instances, I was made weak because I wanted to be accepted by the crowd. In the first dream, I fell asleep, and the old man was able to kick me while I was down. In the 3rd dream, I fell asleep in the face of malevolence (which is my own malevolence) and my gun was stolen, which was my power to vanquish the malevolence of whatever wants to blow up all of my musical aspirations.
Musical aspirations?
Yes.
Everyone in that dream was a musician.
This is what I think my dreams are trying to tell me:
*You mustn’t focus on monetary gain as a measure of success. The great symbol of creative energy (the basket) is not for sale; neither is your ability to aim at the highest good (the bow), which is your ethical center.
*You mustn’t follow the crowd or fear its scorn. It will make you weak and you will not overcome the urge to say, “Screw it. I’m blowing this enterprise straight to hell.”
*Take care of the ageing, bitter, malevolent old men inside of you.
The first one needs his body cared for.
The second one needs a stage.
It wasn’t only a dream where an old man was kicking a young man as he lay unconscious in a field, and there were people milling in that field, as if there had been a battle or the end of stadium rock; not only a dream where I shouted “Enough!” and took the young man in my arms because no one else would.
It wasn’t only a dream where the old man pursued us as we fled, and I evaded him, outwitting him as the young man grew smaller in my arms until he was only a toddler who fit nicely on my right hip. He wore a diaper and shorts and he had skinny arms and legs very much like my son’s and could have been my son, except, as they say in dream-speak, that he wasn’t.
It wasn’t only a dream where there was a change of scene and the old man lay on a floor of large white tiles, a hallway in a museum with glass walls, and I said to him, You Leave Us Alone! and I pressed into his throat with the instep of my boot and he nodded Yes with his head, which was now all that remained of him.
It wasn’t only a dream where we went outside to a lake with small islands in it. I thought the child and I could play there–jump from island to island–but here the old man came, and he lunged at the child and said something vicious through twisted, wet lips.
I drew back my left fist and I. Let. Fly.
The punch landed, deeply satisfied, in the old man’s right cheek.
That part was real.
Today, I have a purple crescent at the base of my left thumbnail and my bedside table is as it ever has been.
I am reminded of Don Quixote and his windmills and I wish that I could talk to this character of Cervantes’, say to him that I know that dreamed enemies are real, but dreamed defense is a gun that dribbles its bullets or a fist that bounces like rubber. Much better to land a solid hit, even if its object is a windmill, or as it was in my case, a bedside table.
The Good Elephant 