Still detectable in my art and literary endeavours the Marian influence from my childhood, from before I turned 11 and refused to confirm in The Catholic Church - which, incidentally, led to my entire family leaving the church. Our world is stitched upon THE world like a dress upon a form. The white clothing is partly the "form" and partly spectral, or ghostly. We could project words upon them, and address the ephemeral that way, but this somehow relegates the actual presence of the individual item to the symbolic. By inscribing the objects with stories, poems, letters (not sent), journal entries, dreams and memories, plus an essay and a few other items, we force the form into evanescent specificity. One afternoon alone in the basement of our house I examined the fireplace which had been built but never made functional, and wondering about this realized I was thinking and questioning, and suddenly I became me.

standing waiting at the roof edge in airports at bus stop in the field behind the dark shed, far from the main road or the side trail just a secret path barely noticeable in the grass or sitting waiting where trains roar and birds scatter just waiting

Dreamed the bicameral place again, only this time it was a city, and small fires could be seen here and there across its black expanse. Called away to find a communication device so that I could venture out, the fires had spread when I returned to the balcony, and half the city was ablaze....

I dreamed last night our three characters were walking the hills, and suddenly found ourselves quite in the middle of a grassy field, deep green, with about 24 white and black tigers. We could not just leave, we had to figure a way out. The chief tigers asked what we were doing there. No sudden moves, no movement toward escape, we were trapped, but not hopeless. On a slight rise to the left, we could see some handrails, or a fence, and some people crouched, watching. "And you won't even help us," I called to them. The dream pretty much ended there.

I did not go to the event because I was afraid.

Did we become entangled in that field, and is it this field where your character is now arriving in the narrative?

I begin the narrative here.

Sept. 12, 2008

The story so far confused me to no end, yet we forge on.

Such summer days must not be ignored, or passed thought casually. The the whole time she was there, Esther was in this state of heightened appreciation, aware of everything going on around her.

The canopied walks were not the only art in public places there, Esther wanted us to know - many courtyards and balconies had beautiful moving pictures, and just about every corridor had a distinctive design, something to distinguish it from others, though the basic codes of design in general there eluded Esther.

Nothing would have prepared anyone for these schemes - and none of the materials used were familiar to Esther, or to Sarah, and none of the methods of depiction seemed related to anything she's seen before.

Music as we know it is unknown, at least, written music. Sound itself is pervasive there, in most places, but it isn't music, exactly, but a part, she was certain, of the atmosphere of any particular corridor, or balcony, or room.

"Parts of the city were actually quite noisy, and some utterly silent," said Esther. There were different sounds at different times too, and at night a kind of low humming or buzzing pervaded the whole place. "I think it helped them sleep, to be honest, and they slept a long time - 16 hours or more."

Those nights were perhaps the strangest, most alienating times for Esther - when the city went to sleep, it really went to sleep. "I think very few stayed awake during the long night, and those who did were in a kind of half-wakefulness, half-sleep state, sleepwalking, almost, but not dreaming, I think."

Sarah said nothing, but appeared deep in thought. Esther had expected her to add some insight to the sleeping/waking state, but she stayed silent, and appeared likely to remain so for some time.

"I went out into the city, sometimes after sleeping about half the night. I was scared, of course, but so curious. The first time was after my friend showed me the abduction room." In 5 hours out and about the city that night, Esther had seen only 6 others, drifting down a corridor, or standing motionless on the northernmost balcony, peering across the forest.

"The one gazing northward, I swear it was one of the presiders at the hearing, and from far away he seemed to glimpse me down below, outside the canopied walk."

Esther thought the norther canopy was somewhat out of place - it looked like a long orange-red balloon, a candy-coloured tube. Inside of it, however, at night, there was nothing to see, as far as she could see.

"I went very close to the covering, and yes, there was a kind of reticent pattern there, but now it appeared the pattern was many layers deep. Looking at it, I started feeling as if I were falling sideways."

She made a note to revisit it in daylight.

"I went back inside the city then, but I immediately got completely lost, for the only time that I was there."

Her fear was not for what could happen, fear of the residents, fear of being without a sense of location, but a real apprehension that she could easily stumble upon something that would reveal a hitherto hidden darkness in the city, a disappointment, a weaknesss, a buried, terrible secret, which she would discover precisely because she was such an outsider.

"It sounds a little like the feeling we get when we vote for someone, and we hope they don't reveal themselves to be deeply corrupt," I said.

Esther smiled. Sarah remained silent.

Sept. 13, 2008
we were back in St. Jacob's, in Esther's house by the river. We could not part just yet.

"Listen," said Sarah, "I have a feeling we won't be together much longer, something is changing. I hope we can get this done soon."

It was late September and the hills and valleys were a strikingly beautiful orange, red and yellow.

"I think we must be finished by the end of the year," added Sarah. "What is coming to me now is that for all of the time I was unconscious, something else was moving in me - I was not simply a sleeping translation unit. All my life I've moved in great circles, coming back to certain points again and again. The circle has been broken," Sarah sighed. Sarah and I were walking to the market on a gorgeous Saturday morning, as the sky seemed to announce great blue peace around us. "Will you stay with Esther?" she asked me.

This idea had also been on my mind, but there was no answering it. The future had become, since their return, an utter mystery, a path to nowhere.

"Perhaps not," I said, and left the rest unspoken.

We loved Esther's house because it was separate, isolated enough from the big world. One could liver there well and never really have to venture far.

We decided to take a trip, just for a few days, to Halifax. Sarah had a friend there, I had lived there in my early 20s for a year, and Esther had wanted for some time to visit her hometown.

Stymied. No way forward. What if Esther had stopped at the foot of those hills, once past the dark red forest? She would not have met the stranger, would not have experienced what eventually became her most difficult memories of the place.

I tried to write about this.

"All was chatter, a kind of noise, implications of future reckoning, which occasionally brought us fullstop looking over the fields, and beyond them, what was left of the great forests. Those few strands of trees remained, not entirely denatured, as echoes of the vanished green, and saddened us consequently.

'All was chatter and noise, feat, the passing of green Earth - gone green we greive for!"

I tried and failed to write about this.

At night, Esther's house is like a sad song of absence, every little thing, every smell, every colour, and all the shapes, singing, mourning.

Like the dream I have repeatedly

I've missed you and have been all the time wondering where you were and what you were doing. I think after all it is not impossible.

I heard them all talking about the future, about a sign, but all the time I was thinking "don't go away, we are sad and lost without you, though we have forgotten nothing, and the world is still green and bright and painful."

Head says leave it be, reluctantly, but heart say there are things to pass between us, different things, a singular making.

Sunny hills, the forest murmuring, clouds occasionally. I was walking south. After a while, I would turn east, then northwest again, and back to the house, which was my home, temporarily. The day was so bright and clear, so uncompromisingly present, it was impossible to believe anything else beside the immediate, the endless present, mattered at all. And lost track of time, somewhere fare to the southwest.

Over hills, through forests, around lakes, along rivers, for 12 days stopping to more or less only to sleep, once in a small tent, once in the loft of an abandoned bar, avoiding towns that were "too large," eating what I found in the wild, in the farmyards, at small country stores.

Has anyone been by, looking this or that way, appearing lost, struck with something awful, or frightening, or overwhelming?

In Portugal, she followed a song, Fado, she learned later, a smoky music born of sadness, the deep spiritual sadness of existence, someone told her. For some time, she watched the woman singing, a kind of magic nonetheless. In Spain, she was besieged by museums and galleries...

The house is so quiet, I am asleep there, always. Like the dream I have had repeatedly, which features an apartment block, one half clean, modern, bright, the other ramshackle, with wooden floors, brown stained doors and frames, everything slightly uneven. I live on that side all the time, I think, but see myself often enough in either side.

There are people I'm simply happy are here in the world

Just a few days now, it will all come clear. Just a few days and she will return.

There is always so much more to learn about everything here. Where is the sense of it all?

Things go so quickly anymore, and there is nothing for it.

Something moving toward greater light, greater light than we have known.

Turning around all the time, things going crazy.

The music even reminds me of you, across the town. Still dreaming of you.

I hear the sound of crying from beyond the wall, as if all sadness were my dwelling.

Almost, the rain is here, possibly a storm - it's been so hot the last few days, most are hoping for this. It is the time of evening just before the streetlights come on. A few brown and yellow leaves can be seen along the sidewalk.

Sunday August 17, 2008

It's been so hot here the last four days, the greying of the sky and a smattering of rain came almost as signs of relief, and most expect more rain, maybe a storm. There has been no wind to speak of, though just now, some stirring in the leave. And, I am stirred to begin this letter to you. And you know, it feels as if there was a different kind of storm far back of the impulse.

Everything, every word, is so full of import.

Those still out who have homes are going to them, if they are not going out.

I dream we are walking at night along a wide street, not even talking, just walking there together, somehow as close as we can ever be even so. And traffic, lights, all the noise of the city is like running water beside us, running down to all the cities of the world, past industrial subdivisions and beyond the great sprawling suburbs, a music and a deep, endless humming.

Perhaps we stop somewhere, not a bar or a cafe, and sit, something wooden, and between darkness and some street-light, because that is always the sense I have of these things, half-dark and half-light, simultaneously.

It's a kind of spell upon us, I imagine, and we need to speak, to disenchant ourselves, but at the same time we do not want to break the surface tension, the silence.

I dream you are abducted by aliens in an immense flash of light, and we are all left standing in the heavy overcast of your absence, lost and bend with melancholy. I remember winter afternoons in Ontario that were almost as grey, but you were at least still on the planet then, I would be thinking.

It's been decades since I felt this way. Now strange, and unlikely, from such a small motion. And yet, being honest about it, it seems immense, measureless.

There are people I'm simply happy are here in the world. Sarah for sure, and you.

I wish the dreams would tell me what to do, what to say to you, because all that occurs to me here are difficult, uncomfortable, wild words, threatening to run off in all directions, a confusion and a tangle.

But of course it feels so good to be in this state, such a powerful thing, and nothing like it in the world, for there is no work of art can even apporach this.

you're not listening

I have been an example, an excuse
something is proved through
me

you're not listening if
- you miss the point of their screams
- you don't know what configuration
has made their statements possible

the world is further
and deeper than we thought
and what we know of it unravels
from our hands like fallen banners

the moon disappears
behind the schoolyard trees
boys playing games
that kill them, eventually

beyond the horizon, lightning cracked
its white sheets
the migraine of potential
wrong stormed toward us
frenzied with stars

D writes

I know what teeth
what hands
I know the location
of every hair on my head

I know the smallness of a soul
and what panning a lifetime
finds, instead
of finding it

I know the fragile chemistry
the cost of its maintenance

I know the blackest eyes of night
and the brightest star of silence

I wanted to drive you

a reality like that
silences

I was scared to death
just talking to her
I kept thinking the war
would break out of her

(something like a camp
sguatting on the ground
quantum history)

voice that crossed ocean
in desperation
boat that came in
to drown in this people
like black water

without history, without medicine
without helicopters
one desperate, insane
reluctance looks pretty much like any other
and the asylums of this world rest
on the brink of deep
discoveries for good
lucky

I wanted to break you
out from the compact white headache
of territory
like a bitter almond

I wanted to drive you
between the eyes
of a city waking up the morning
after nothing

and did I see them one night
flying
the irresistable colours of their exile?
(when the earth was a cold, wet cloth
and the sky was made of iron)

I am haunted

I am haunted by the vacancies
her eyes made
the silent "O" in hung
mouth ringing
unspeakable gestures