Eye of The Other Tiger: Borges and the Dreamer Within

Triptych for Borges' poem "El Otro Tigre" by Elza Norma Gonzalez

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.” 

Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Circular Ruins” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (a source)

All may read the entire English translation of Borges' text, "The Circular Ruins." This piece of intensely magical literature breathes a truth rarely spoken. Life is not simply a dream, but a dream within a dream. As one may chance on an ancient temple, or its ruins, there is a parallel labyrinth quality of sacred architecture and geometry in life and consciousness. As we dig deeper into the internal realities of our lives, we find that to dream is more resonant with the truths of our ephemeral existence. More and more, as I live a life of conscious dreaming, I confront the ultimate truth that I am impermanent, and was not made to last. To dream within the dream of life is the beginning of truth-seeking in the creative arts, and in the drama of everyday voice and action. The dream within the dream is the resonant core of our foundation; the heart of our mind. And finally, we are led into the holy of holies, the central chamber of the temple ruins, where we see through the eyes of a Dreamer who is not us, and yet who dreams our lives. Or, as Borges writes in El Otro Tigre (translated by Alastair Reid), "Let us look for a third tiger. This one will be a form in my dream like all the others..."

See my related posts: Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious & Borges and The Ancestral Mirror of World Literacy

_________

 She shares with me her dream by being, and I become hers.

Enter Her Image by RK

She Above the Soft Night by RK

Full Moon Pines by RK

Inner City Arboreal Heart Transplant by RK

Face of the Dreamer by RK

____________

...napping between contiguous web-threshed freedoms to a forgotten deafening…and thickening the low-coasted noon of the heat wave forecast…my mind becomes sullen with blank remorse and a violent emptiness fills me…bearing down on memory like a catastrophic angel of the white light…pitch black featureless dusk of interpersonal reason in the long endless fight to be good and seek happiness in the joyful cries of others…

Bingeing on the unnecessary billions…whose lives anger at the human mold in a resounding attempt to save a bit of that home…that once was stolen from the earth’s own sun-dried hands…still cool with the dank earth and her womb of littered seeds

And the rains pour angelic wisdom over the arisen anguish…to craze for the source and defy the powers that be in an unanswered mind of free rationality...

Dreaming of berries in season and wild-crafting the maze of Her swollen lust…turning on the locomotion of boom bang music over the café loudspeaker…three hours into space in the beyond of our lost anxious sound...

“Each to their own” writes back the lazy teacher…beginning with Zen and ending with architecture…bending for no one except the jungle fire steaming behind the glassed promenade…glowering sickly in the mud of visionary astonishment…shaken in a thud…the mortified martyrs’ brought cinematic drip dry skin…to toast their muscular direction to the lunar fist...

excerpts from "Random Parkade of Fences"

Dreamtime and the Repatriation of Sacred Letters

Stencil art showing unique clan markers and dreamtime stories symbolising attempts to catch the deceased's spirit

"The source of the word alcheringa is Arunta, an aboriginal language of Australia. Sometimes translated as “the dreamtime,” it refers to a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time and continues to exist in our own time as a parallel world, revealing itself whenever we dream and whenever someone speaks or sings a myth." Dennis Tedlock, An Introduction to the Alcheringa Archive (From Jacket2, also on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics) 

In the first edition of "Alcheringa" a quote reads, "He who loses his dreaming is lost", attributed to "Australian Aborigine". In opening of the Autumn 1970 journal, the final "Statement of Intention" reads, "to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations". That being said, it is curious to read such studies as that printed in the Australian Journal of Media & Culture (vol. 2, no. 1 1987), where an article by Vijay Mishra entitled, "Aboriginal representations in Australian texts" reads, 

Forgotten I lost dreaming
Country I left forgotten lost 

which is epigrammatieally reduced, by the translator T.G .H. Strehlow, to "He who loses his dreaming is lost," is directly related to a failure to perceive the radical difference between oral poetics (the fluid verse translation) and the wrillen text (the epigrammatic reduction). Obviously no one can maintain a total separation of the oral from the written.

Meanwhile, if one searches in the active publications of Australia's Central Land Council, an Indigenous repertoire of activism and scholarship dedicated to principles of sovereignty, there is a very interesting article on the Strehlow, the subject of lost attribution in Alcheringa's English translation from "Australian Aborigine"entitled, "The Strehlow collection of sacred objects" regarding further issues of repatriation, while focusing on the repatriation of sacred object collected by the modern anthropologist, as opposed, in the case of Alcheringa, the repatriation of sacred letters, collected by post-modern anthropologists of world literature.

Headgear worn during dancing (wood, human hair, kangaroo hair, feathers); Arrernte people, Australia

________

My mother visits her perception of my reality. North of here, it gets even colder, earlier, and winter is almost perpetual. I ask her exactly what her interests are. She is unresponsive. There are two streets that accommodate visitor appeal, with cafes and the like. We walk on the frozen sidewalk ground. A haze of white ice sheathes the panorama, compressing the moment into one look of sheer petrification. Walking down the main street, it seems as though no one lives here, the outside aesthetics are drab and unused, mere coverings for the inside hospitality, driven by weathered necessity. As we walk into a café, I realize I have enemies here. In the back hall, awaiting our hot teas, a youth of my age wrestles my muscles and joints in a twisted bout of unwanted pain. Unable to satisfy his need for violence, I ask that we exit the café, and so we return into the cold, sunless ache of our thirsting feet. 

Shoes (made from feathers and human hair); Arrernte people, Australia

Midway through the year, I go south to visit my father, to witness birth. With video camera in hand, I capture my contracting stepmother on the front lawn overlooking the St. Lawrence River. In great joyful upheaval, she cries, “it’s a boy!” as the body emerges. 

Ku-ring-gai_Chase - petroglyph, via Waratah Track (Rock is triassic Hawkesbury Sandstone, 220 million years of age)

That night, sitting lone by the coal-burning fire, I am visited by a presence. A naked Indian, greeting me with the power of a thousand friendships, unites in my melodrama with healing insight. He teaches me the power of the directions, North and South. The cold childless North of human danger and the impenetrable forces of nature, and the warm South of youthful diversion in the over-ritualized haunt of abundant fires. He reaches out to me, to plead with him for the stars to answer in earthly illumination. While with eyes closed, he recounts the bitter tales of repatriation, colonization and the staggering visions of post-genocide rehabilitation, for the entire world. And I wake, alone. The sun, directly overhead in a cloudless sky, is in full eclipse.

________

A presence belied in the soft air aglow with diligent drizzle
         From this, our American lighthouse heaven,
                 Alit with dream
                 in stories told by great-grandmother’s
                          Life lived outside the pages of the “true”
                                      And into the truly earth-quaking
                                      of dream

...

Men whose throats burn with the soil of their unloved mother
        Croaking up agro-fossil drains
                Reaching from modern skylines to prehistory,
                issuing from our Christ-death

...

In the housed mystery of our yet undiscovered world
        Beneath each colonial home
                Shot out of the ugly worldview
                        Misplaced over the moral genealogy

In an ecological philosophy
        To dry the eyes of our spectral hosts
               Who watch and wonder
                        With still unborn eyes

- excerpt from "With Still Unborn Eyes"

Sufi Poetics: Spontaneity and Oration in Rumi's Verse

(Found at "Awakening the Dreamer")

“Someone may be clairvoyant, able to see the future, and yet have very little wisdom. Like the man who saw water in his dream and began leading everyone toward the mirage…Sleep deeply wherever you are on the way, maybe some traveler will wake you.” – Rumi, translated and read by Coleman Barks

“Be loyal to your daily practice keep working and keep knocking on the door, as you’ll remember as it is said in one of Rumi’s most pithy moments that the door we’re knocking on opens from the inside...These poems were spoken spontaneously.” - Coleman Barks

The generation of dreaming is the door opening from the inside, the spontaneous voice is the mysterious wisdom reminding us that at the moment when the way is clear, it is not we who enter.

_______

At an outdoor music festival, there is chaos. My wife and I gear up to perform together, though there is tension. As we sit and watch the festivities surrounding, we are as encased in a fog gloom. I forecast a no-show or gong show somewhere between us, usually from my end, the weak one. We see likely faces around, old friends at work on their instruments, in bands, invigorating the public eye. One of our friends, a burly Latin man sits at our spot with us. I walk away, fading. I begin to overhear their conversation. “He’s unwilling to learn from any classical training…” In my high paranoia, I only hear my depressed interpretation. I wallow in self-pity before confronting my love. She is already up on stage, interviewed in the drinkable light, interred in a media pandemic. Defeated, I find our Latin friend, and talk about my troubles. He is extremely accepting and friendly. I am comforted by his freewill offerings of friendship in numerous forms as he helps me overcome my difficulties. I become excited again to play purely improvisational music. Our music is from the spontaneous breath of the heart, an instantaneous intuitive wresting of the mind from earthly clamor. My love sits fixated, unwilling to go about her interview smoothly, she points me out in the crowd. Soon I am onstage. She holds me up, a flamingo above the shallow water, with a stilt leg, barely seen in the shimmering gold seascape horizon.

______ 

Performing
"In general, to dream of performing means you have been dishonest, with others or yourself. If it's a pleasant dream, lying has worked in your favour, but it could have bad consequences. This is also a common dream of performers who are 'practicing' a routine in their sleep." (iDream)

Stage
"If you dream of being onstage, you crave more attention and drama in your life. Good times are coming, but you will have to work hard to get there." (iDream)

In light of the Sama'a or the Sufi practice of listening to supernal harmonies through various meditative means, mostly through music and poetry, the practice of turning the ear to hear the inborn harmonics of spirit, i.e. listening to the one listening, may be an antidote to the psychological sufferings of the performing artist.

______

whose secret existence frightens no one
...instantaneous
...insignificant
yet to always be present,
in the moment,
never born nor witnessed by any thing manifest,
whispering from a most minute creation,
a passing glut,
forgotten by the entire visible universe,
only to return through a remembering

heard in voiceless rhythm,
to create from nothing!
an identity beyond the mimicking mold,
shaped by more hands.

- excerpt from "shaped by more hands"