The Rise and Fall of a Sparrow

 The last night I was imaginary 

We lay with our heads to the waterline 

And the sky was crowded with birdsong made light 

You said my voice was completed 

A crystalline thrill of diamond speech 

And I thanked you and adored you 

And left anyway, crushing knives and ashes underfoot 

Before leaving my feet forever

The Belltower of Babel (dreamtime)

    I was back at university with S., on the last day of fall term. So it was bastard cold and the buses and trains were all running late and the floor of the Social Sciences lobby was awash in slush and salt and gravel from outside. And of course there'd been a mixup with my schedule so I was signed up for a 4th-year biochem class, which I wasn't aware of and therefore hadn't been attending, so I had to see the department head to get documentation that I was not actually a BCM student, had not attended a single session of the course, and thus had permission to drop after the drop deadline without academic penalty.  Cue standard bureaucratic bullshit on top of various department end-of-term / Xmas parties and nobody really wanting to get any work done.  In addition, the library (which was still in the former buildings) had now subsided to the point that the main administrative areas were in (unheated) subterranean caves.

    So I'm standing in a huge lineup with about a hundred other people, all clutching bedraggled bits of paperwork and blowing on their hands.  I'd actually acquired a coffee at some point, so that was nice.  But the line was still taking forever, and instead of the standard pylon-and-rope arrangement for managing queues, the line just snaked through a labyrinth of tunnels.

[LATER]

    Still at the university, except this was one of the multiple-origin areas that didn't really resemble any specific campus so much as a mashup of all of them.  I'd parked illegally somewhere and was hurrying to a (meeting / lecture?) in this massive, cavernous space like the hollow cast of a beehive, with a ramp spiraling up the interior and corridors leading off in all directions.  I checked my phone in a panic but couldn't read the time (you'd think this would have clued me in that it was a dream), and I was still dressed in my winter stuff, so heavy boots and multiple layers of clothing topped off with my big-ass cloak. And then this bell started going off, and it was so loud the floor was shaking, so I just ditched the cloak and started running like hell to get to wherever I was going before it stopped.

Maybe Someone Else Should Drive

A face in the clouds

A voice in your ear

The graffiti of bird tracks in dusted snow

Pareidolia does not suffice

When all omens and portents

Drag insistently at your sleeve

A 10-coincidence pileup

Triggered by a running joke played

By the specific at the expense of the typical

Singularity

 You're the sort of person

Who steps off a corner into traffic 

As though the headlights like everything else

 

Were too slow to touch you

 

The last night you were here

 

I never saw you

But your passage was marked by a convulsion of light

As on all sides bright insubstantial chatter

Turned raw and vitreous before rending

 

All you ever leave behind is a lack

Vacancy

 You gave me a picture, once 

Of a winter sun-pale room with a half-open door

 

I watched it steadily, steadfastly

Through racking days of sickness

 

Prayed to it, the clean and solitude

 

With blood on my lips

I never saw who entered

To mourn the hollow space 

Gearing Down Dialing Back (dreamtime)

     It's cold as fuck and the coven (3/5 of us) are hunkered down in the alley behind Dickens.  T. gives me a bit of a hard time about the watch.

    "Right, because nothing says spooky black magicians doing dark rituals like a Donald Duck watch."

    "Look, between the fucking steampunks and collectors, it's getting *hard* to find cheap fully-mechanical watches these days, okay? Beggars can't be choosers. It's gonna be scrap in a few minutes anyway."

    So we throw up a quick circle with powdered charcoal so we can see the line against the dirty snow, fumbling with the lighter and the alcohol, which flares briefly blue but gives no warmth.

    I set down the watch and the roll of caps and fumble for the hammer in my purse.

    "We ready then?"

    T. and M. nod.

    "Alright. Give me a countdown."

    "Three. Two. One."

    "IAO ENTROPY

    YOU CAN'T WIN

    YOU CAN'T BREAK EVEN

    YOU CAN'T QUIT

    (pause)

    BUT WE CHEAT"

    I bring the hammer down on the roll of caps, which makes a satisfyingly loud bang and sends a shock running up my arm. The kids smoking behind the dumpster peer around the corner curiously. I sweep the demolished watch into a small paper bag, pour the rest of the booze on it, and leave it burning forlornly in the middle of the alley. We don't look back as we return to the light and heat and noise.

Gordian

When clarity is smothered by

The whispered scorn of the chorus

I long for silence

The sword between sensation and analysis

Dissolution of qualification of 

Moderation of

Sober second thought

Letting the unmediated now

Pour through every unshuttered window

The blissful relief when words - finally - fail

Invisible Graffiti (dreamtime)

    (Reconstructed from admittedly not particularly coherent voice memo at ~8:37 A.M. - was kind of busy getting the sigils down on paper before they disappeared.)

    Okay, so full disclosure - I don't actually know what the sigils at the end of this post will do.  However, given the circumstances (post-eclipse window, the person who gave them to me), I figure what the hell?  What's the worst that could happen (don't answer that).

    Dream started at the School, which is a fairly accurate amalgamation of features of various schools I've been to or more recently that ze boy has been to.  I was with ze boy and S., and initially it looked like we were there for a standard parent-teacher meeting, except it was in one of the art rooms and shortly after we arrived the teacher just up and left, at which point we started raiding the supply cabinets for paints and brushes. Then there was a sharp cut to what appeared to be a run-down rec centre (second story, old brick building, cast-iron radiators, and minimal furniture in the rooms apart from steel-frame stacking chairs and folding tables).  A few floors down, though (basement or sub-basement), there was supposedly a temple space used by some sinister (of course) occult order who had according to rumours were keeping a dragon, although it was unclear whether this was an honest-to-gods D&D-style dragon, an allegorical one, some clever animatronic device, or what (or what doing a lot of heavy lifting here - basically nobody knew and everybody talked a load of rubbish in the absence of specific evidence).

    The rest of the coven were here as well, and we were supposed to paint sigils on some of the walls as well as mark the corners and centre points of all the walls to create a sort of wire map of the entire structure.  We had reflective, UV-reactive, and luminous paint which I was trying to mix together for maximum visibility except the reflective particles were clumping together and separating out, so I was shaking the hell out of a large jar while trying to explain what the plan was and making a hash of both in the process.

    Eventually we went downstairs (and why the hell every basement in my dreams has a creepy, ill-lit concrete stairwell, I'm at a loss to explain) and the "temple", apart from some *extremely* dusty velvet drapes covering the back wall, was empty.  Behind the drapes, though, there was a set of doors which led... out into a ruined stone amphitheatre, blinding sunlight bleaching the colour out of the surrounding scrubby landscape. So this was where... *something* was going to happen, presumably on the stage at the opposite end from where we were standing. I noticed that the sigils we had been painting on the walls of the building were repeated here, but carved in relief on the stage and into the flagstones of the central bowl. As we stood there, the amphitheatre started to fill up with spectators, dressed in vaguely ahistorical-but-not-modern clothing.  We went back through the doors to regroup, and R. mentioned that we should have perhaps brought our passports for this gig.

    Suddenly I found myself driving across University Bridge in Saskatoon, on the way from our old apartment building to the Albert Community Centre, which may actually have been the same building we were in, so it's likely that this took place at an earlier point in the timeline.  I was pulling up to a stoplight and my brakes weren't working properly, so I ended up halfway into the intersection and tried to back up, only to have the car continue rolling back towards a car approaching behind me. When I finally stopped, I was in the back seat and the car was on the grass in front of the RUH. There was a cop outside tapping on the window and I was trying to figure out what had just happened and how to explain it when I realized I was dreaming (losing control of the car should have been a dead giveaway - cars invariably behave unpredictably when I'm dreaming).

    After that, I found myself in the back of a police car with an old man, who I knew in that way you just know things in dreams was Austin Osman Spare of all people.  He was handcuffed, but I wasn't, which I assumed meant that I wasn't in trouble and was just getting dropped off at home (this doesn't, in hindsight, make any sense, but - dream logic). While the cops were distracted by something, he just casually pulled his hand free of the cuff, pressed a small jar into my hand, and said "don't forget".

So I didn't.  And here's the sigils.  Fire or don't, at your own risk.

Remembrance

     I have a difficult relationship with Remembrance Day. The only member of my family actually involved in WWII was my maternal grandfather, who was from a small village in northern Germany. He wasn't involved in the Nazi Party. There was no Jewish community in the village. Given his age at the time, I have a suspicion that he didn't really have much of a choice about whether to enlist or not, regardless of his feelings about Hitler and the Fatherland. But still.

    They sent him to the Eastern Front. Not Stalingrad, but just as horrific, from what my mother has told me secondhand. He never talked about his time in the military to anyone except her and my aunt, towards the end. No food, inadequate supplies, scorched earth - an endless slog of frozen mud and blood and murder. When their commanding officer died (whether by a Soviet bullet or mutiny - he never said and Mum never asked), he and the surviving members of his unit fled the advancing Red Army and went looking for the Americans so they could surrender and maybe eventually go home.

    He spent the better part of a year in a POW camp, went back to his village, sold the farm, and emigrated to Canada, sending for his family once he'd found a job and a place to live with the help of the Salvation Army (my feelings about them are for another post and another complicated set of feelings).  He never talked about the war again, and once he retired from his job, was never sober again until the day he died. Whatever wound he carried - the shame and grief and guilt - took 45 years to kill him.

    So that's it. The ceremonies here are all about how our side fought for freedom, paid a terrible price, and prevailed. What ceremony is there for when you come back and realize what you fought and paid in blood for was something unworthy - a vicious, contemptible lie, propagated by men unfit to lead?

The Party Must Continue (Dreamtime)

     [NB:  Transcribed from audio notes made this morning]

    This morning's dream was located in the hotel.  There are a number of consistent geographical features in my dream, for lack of a better word, city, although their positions change relative to each other, largely dependent on which of them seem to be required for narrative purposes.  So, the hotel.  It's large, and old, and layrinthine in complexity.  Kind of like the Banff Springs Hotel (or any of the other former CP Rail hotels) but scaled up to a ridiculous degree.  

    S. and I were there for either a wedding or a really elaborate LARP.  So a good portion of our room was taken up by costumes, props, prosthetics, etc.  Ze boy wasn't there, so I assume he stayed back home with my folks. There was also a howling blizzard going on outside, which wouldn't have been a problem except the power lines kept icing over, so the lights would go out and we'd be getting ready by candlelight.  I had some sort of official role, so I was also trying to memorize a script, and S. was lacing me up in a corset and kept asking me if it was too tight and whether I could still breathe. So I got a little pissy and shouted that if I was still capable of yelling then yes, *clearly* I could still breathe.  And then I realized I'd forgotten to put on my boots and got even more annoyed.

    S. finally got tired of the drama and went to get ready. He seemed to be going for the Raul-Julia-as-Gomez-Addams look, which is a pretty good look on him.  It had the added bonus of him having to lose the hobo beard, which, yay.

   By the time we got downstairs the lights had come back on, and the party was in full swing.  I was carefully trying to make my way over to the stage without stepping on my skirt (or someone else stepping on it) when I ran into J.  It's been a good 20 years since I last saw him, but he looked exactly the same. We saw each other at roughly the same time, then awkwardly pretended not to have. 

Summer 1992 (In Search of Lost Time)

    On May long K. and I go to Toronto so I can meet his friends, A. and C., who are "hardcore goths". They live in the basement of an old house off Dundas Street. All the windows are painted over and the walls are covered in salvaged velvet curtains. The only bright lights in the entire apartment are in the bathroom and the kitchen. The main feature of the kitchen is a large Bauhaus poster with little bits of dried pasta stuck to it. They check to see if pasta is al dente by throwing it at the poster. If it sticks to Peter Murphy, it's done. 

    A has a pile of electronic equipment stacked up all over the place, and the first night he and K. entertain me and C. by seeing who can produce the most disgusting MIDI noises. The next day C drags me off to Kensington to spend the afternoon wandering in and out of secondhand shops. I buy a top hat, a string of skull beads, and some Manic Panic purple dye. We go to a club and spend most of the time giggling at the other goths, who are very serious about their dancing. I learn that gin and tonic is the most goth drink because it glows under black light. 

    The following night, we drop. I end up lying in their bed listening to a Projekt compilation CD on infinite loop. C. comes in to check on me. 

    "How's it going?"

    "I think I'm dead."

    "You look great though. I'm gonna light some more incense, okay?"

    Eventually, I get bored of being dead and come out to listen to some different music. A. says he'll make a mix tape for me of anything I like. They have an enormous music collection - probably about 300 or so CDs. 

    The next day, before K. and I leave, I try out the Manic Panic. Since I've never dyed my hair before, it goes about as badly as expected.

A Slight Case of Hamster Brain Parte the Second

I really need to remember to write earlier in the day. I mean, it's not a case of "OhGodsMyLifeIsAHotMess" tonight, it's more along the lines of "ehhhhhhh... I don't wanna." So nyar. Maybe I'll have an interesting dream tonight. Last night it was the airport, but by the time I finished dealing with morning (read: noonish) stuff, having breakfast, dealing with bloody Telus and their bloody non-functioning phone lines... it had pretty much faded to the standard memories of running around through an impossibly huge terminal with no clear signage and missing documentation. No secret what my unconscious is trying to tell me *there*. So I'm going to bed.

Winter 1992 (In Search of Lost Time)

    I'm 20 years old. It's a bastard cold Friday night in late March and I'm sitting on W's least questionable sofa waiting for something to happen. Half an hour ago, K, a mutual friend, had given me a tiny square of paper and told me to put it under my tongue. Fifteen minutes ago, he had stuck a tape into W's stereo and turned it on.  Five seconds after that, I had nearly jumped out of my skin when the speakers let out a frankly horrific noise.

    W. glared at him.

    "You know, 'Last Rights' is not what most people would pick as a soundtrack for someone's first fucking acid trip. What the hell is wrong with you?"

    "Yeah, but I just got it, and I really wanted to listen to it tonight..."

    "Is it supposed to sound like that?"

    "Okay, fine, I can turn it off, what do you want to listen to instead?"

    "W, I think something's wrong with your tape deck. Or me."

    "No, you're fine. Fuck, put on Sisters or something, Jesus. You goddamn lunatic."

    Another fifteen minutes in and I start finding the whole situation hilarious.

    "Yeah, there you go. Hey, you want to see something cool?"

    He turns off all the lights in the room and closes the drapes. The stereo's digital display wobbles slightly. K lights a cigarette and starts waving it around, and the ember leaves behind a jittering curve of fading red.

    "Ooooooh. Hey, where's the flashlight? I want to try."

    [Later]

   We order a pizza. I carefully put the correct amount of money, plus a generous tip, right next to the door  in order to avoid having to talk any more than absolutely necessary. W assures me that the delivery guy has probably dealt with people in much worse states. I learn firsthand about temporal relativity when the clock stays stuck at 11:15 for the next several hours.

    [Much Later]

    We go outside. It's snowing and I'm staring dumbstruck at the sky watching the snowflakes streak downward like the slowest, tiniest shooting stars ever. I start talking a load of pretentious shit about the molecular structure of ice crystals and fractals and walk face-first into a lamppost.

    [Very Early]

    Saturday morning cartoons, I am convinced, are created primarily for people coming down and only incidentally for children.

For Beatrice

Lady of the Perfume Jar

Devouring One

Daughter of Ra

Come to us

Lead your child to the sunlit lands in the West

May She who walks in the silent places

Guide your feet to make no sound

May She who hunts in the hidden places

Bring forth prey for you to chase

May She who sleeps in the warm places

Prepare a soft bed for your comfort

May She who sees in the dark places

Light the shadows as you pass into her lands

Let the sistrum ring for you

Let incense make the air sweet

Lady of Bubastis accept these offerings

Take your daughter home

Hamster Brain

    Didn't go to bed until 2 AM this morning, so right now my brain's doing that thing where it pinballs between an increasingly crowded field of really bad ideas and worst-case scenarios. So not much chance of productive writing or indeed productive anything really.

Summer 1991 (In Search of Lost Time)

    I'm 19. It's my first co-op work term, in Ottawa. Because I've never lived anywhere else and because it's close to downtown and reasonably cheap, I move into the YWCA. It's a lot like how I imagine living in a dorm would have been if I'd not ended up going to university in Calgary and living at home. My parents, overprotective even when I'm at home, insist I call every night. I tell them about my job (revising pamphlets for Health & Welfare Canada), the city (lots of museums and galleries, especially near Parliament Hill), and assure them that I'm taking my medications, that I have enough money, that I'm having a good time. I don't tell them that I spend most of my free time when I'm not at work or sleeping riding around on random OC Transpo buses deliberately getting lost; that I'm subsisting on noodle packets, fruit, cereal, peanut butter straight from the jar, and coffee because most of my kitchen stuff got nicked and I can't be arsed to cook anyway. I don't tell them that, alone, unchaperoned, and with no friends  here yet, I've never felt so deliriously, incredibly *alive*.

    After about 3 weeks, I've got a pretty good idea of where everything I want to see is, how long it'll take to get there, and that I *really* fucking hate the Y.  It's not the communal kitchen or bathroom facilities that bother me so much as the fact that I've already decided that I'm going to be spending all my time near the Byward Market, and also the punk girl in the adjacent room keeps bringing her boyfriend round for noisy, enthusiastic sex on work nights and I do actually need to sleep for at least 6 hours a night.  So I start looking for a new place, and find what appears to be a walk-in closet in a shared house 5 minutes from the Rideau Street bus mall for $250 a month.  The other girls in the house are tolerable, the landlady only shows up to collect the rent, and I don't really intend to spend much time there anyway, so it suits me fine.  

I start experimenting with becoming someone else.

Goodbye Hobbes

I have a problem letting things go.  Anyone who knows me knows this.  I've kept cars, relationships, and computers out of sentiment long past when they were actually worth the expense / effort / software jury-rigging required to maintain them.

I am trying to let my cat go.  He is 18 years old.  His eyes are clouded with cataracts, his gait is stiff in the mornings, and he's diabetic.  He also has what the vet believes is a tumour on his head, just above his right eye.  It's this last thing that might be the thing that makes me give him up.  Because although he can still jump up onto the bed with me at night, and his appetite is healthy, and he still enjoys lying in sunny patches around the house… 

There is a point - I've seen it in other animals, just before they died or were put down - where the spark goes out in the eyes, and they move as if they were only looking for the perfect spot to lie down and not move again.  And when someone asked me whether it wouldn't be kinder to have him put down… no. Because he's not at that point yet.  But if it's cancer, then that changes things, because I don't want to stand aside deluding myself that he's fine as it consumes bone and tissue and nerves.  I want to say goodbye before he starts to look at me in reproach because I won't let him die.

But really, I want my boy back in my arms for one more day / week / month so that my love will travel with him on the final journey into night.

Last Known Sighting

Highsummer golden light and we are caught
Between shadowed forest and brilliant tidestruck beach
Memory carries hallucinatory clarity
But it's not good enough for proof

Which amounts to a skittering muted recording
(That could be anything)
And a grainy pixellated photo of
You stumbling towards the shuttered trees
And me with a handful of scrambled magnetic wails

Through the Rust and Gasoline (dreamtime rehash)

It's raining, and it could very well have been a solid forty days and nights for all the difference the passage of time makes here.  Time is marked by the starting of fires and the slow rise of greasy black smoke into the slightly paler clouds.  It's marked by the slow change of steel to reddish powder and by the transmutation of bright copper wire to burnt verdigris.  Occasionally, it's marked by the sudden collapse of dysfunctional machinery into a tangle of useless scrap.

There are marks on the ground as well.  Muddy prints of boots tracked through the mud, filling up slowly with iridescent-skinned water.  It smells like oil and burning jet fuel with a faint hint of contraband and cordite. Sometimes it smells like rotting garbage or burning meat.

It's still raining.  You're shivering in the crumpled husk of a Lear jet, waiting for the pilot and not seeming to realize that he's slowly liquefying in the cabin up front.

Somewhere half a mile up, a vulture angel with steel wings circles lazily.

Sideways to the Sun (dreamtime)

Just dreamed about our old place in Saskatoon - S. and I were driving down the street, and as we passed the seniors' residence I noticed that it was covered in ice. It looked like someone had dropped a full payload from a water bomber on it, then flash-frozen it as the water hit. Which would have been weird enough, but it was summertime, so really the ice should have melted / be melting. We parked in our old spot and got out, and it looked like all three of the old buildings were in the process of being renovated - lots of scaffolding and plastic sheeting flapping around in the hot, dusty wind. It was the weekend though, so none of the workers were around.

When we went into the building to have a look around, it looked strange - all the walls facing onto the hallway had been knocked out, and the floors had been raised nearly half a metre, but there were clearly people living in the apartments even though an entire wall was missing and they had no privacy or security as a result. Our old place was even worse - parts of the roof had also been removed and the wind was blowing the plastic sheeting around. I also noticed that there was a gap between the outer brick wall and the inner wall. I pushed aside a loose panel of drywall and climbed into the gap. There was a narrow staircase (more of a ladder, really) going up to the attic. S. followed me up, and as he blocked the light from below, the air shuddered slightly and the dust seemed to glitter in the darkness.

The attic was bigger than you'd expect, looking at it from the outside. Better lit, too - a sort of golden late afternoon light filtering through the vents at either end and cracks in the brickwork and roof. It looked like there were a bunch of homeless kids squatting in the space, except after looking around some more the place looked more like a pub / arcade than a living space, and the kids looked... fey, for lack of a better term. Delicate, angular features, strangely coloured eyes, slightly pointed ears - the whole nine yards. The older guy behind the bar was, rather stereotypically, a troll - huge and craggy and distinctly blue-tinged. I noticed that there was a massive stone hammer on a rack above the bar. Good security. I didn't order anything (I think I meant to ask him some questions about what the deal was with the building), but he just handed me a mug full of something. It turned out to be wine - specifically this ludicrously expensive Chateau d'Yquem that a friend of my dad's brought over one evening for no particular reason. It was ice-cold and tasted like sunlight and apricots and orange blossom honey.

"You can't stay here," he said. "Go back to the world and stop them before we're driven out forever."

I was swaying slightly and turned around to tell S. what they wanted, and then I realized that he couldn't see any of this. I saw through his eyes and the attic was cramped and dusty and stuffy, and there was nothing up there except some construction supplies. He hadn't seen the ice on the other building either. I had no idea what to do next. I tried to give him the cup, but it turned into an old bird's nest in my hand.