Mirror in the Hay, Thanks for showing me the way #6

A Black and White Dream

-Wake up, sleepy bear, wake up! Maybe if I tell you a story, it will work in reverse to become a “get-up-time” story, and it will make you come back from wherever you’re wandering as you sleep... So here it goes. Once upon a time, as I saw you in a dream, you were a little girl, and you were staying at a place where a birthday or similar was celebrated. From that attic’s window, one could see a school ground below… People had decided to play a prank on little you. They had you lie on a couch, then asked you to close your eyes, and with a burnt cork they painted parts of your face black, under the eyes and on the cheeks. They wanted you to believe that you had been sleeping for months. You kind of knew that it was not true but were so stunned at their blatant lie that you did not understand that it was a joke. Everybody laughed and you did not. You were not offended or mad; you did not feel as a victim either, you were just wondering why they felt the need to do that, and your personal need was to understand their mindset. You felt a bit like an E.T. and your inquisitive mind secretly wondered if it would actually be possible to be sleeping for so long, and what it would imply.

-Listen, I answer from my sleep, I am attending a talk by a professor of Lakota language and culture. He is saying: “the more you’re teased, the more you’re loved…”

-See, that’s what it means. Don’t you understand?

-I do. Actually, I could not help saying “I am SO loved” out loud… Everybody laughed, with me. The professor also smiled and added: “if the person does not laugh and apparently feels hurt, though, it’s no longer laughing with them, but at them”.

-Oh stop taking things so dramatically, will you? says a voice that sometimes wishes all would be as stoic as a Buddhist monk and doesn’t seem to remember when he’s the one taking things a bit out of proportion. And the voice goes on: You know, maybe by circling your eyes with that blackened cork were they directed to do so by something that was greater than them, you and all of us. Maybe they were not exactly the ones deciding to do it, but were the mere channels to perform a ritualistic gesture that might take you within the dark around those eyes to remember when you were old…

-Oh wow… “To remember when I was old”… Mmmh… I’ll think of it that way, although you know, sometimes I’m inclined to do what my neighbor does when her obnoxious miniature of a dog keeps on barking and barking and barking when my kitties and I are outside: “That’s enough!” she commands. I guess it’s what my long slumber has meant: “enough, break, pause, siesta, thank you”. But hey, well done, you woke me up! So how are you, voice?

-Happy that you’re finally responding. You’ve just said: “Bark-ing, and bark-ing and bark-ing”… We might explore the reason why you felt like saying this three times… Like the three blows before a play… Welcome to the dream, now that you woke up! You know, I am proud of having made you react. Maybe because my mention of the cork is what reached your ear, since I use corks for ears to receive the needle that pierces them…

- Cork from the cork oak tree… I say retracing in my mind the material origin of the bottle stopper… It’s called bouchon de liège in French, I always wondered why they had named it after my Belgian province, Liège, before I learned that it was a tree species. That’s what happens to us folks who grew up in a mostly urban setting. We are illiterate, nature-wise.

-What, again, an interesting adjective you used here…

-Speaking of interesting, I saw a little video of cork work. I loved to see the workers leave the tree unclad when it’s time to take its bark out. It looks like a huge snake shedding skin. You know, it’s done in cycles of 9 years… And only adult trees undergo the process.

-See… Maybe what you see as an obnoxious four-legged also had a more profound reason to bark, if you feel an interest for that tree processing… I missed that kind of conversation when you slept, says the voice in a happy tone. I was so bored and kind of sad with no chatterbox around. You’ve been sleeping for so long, I was getting a bit worried.

-You’re too nice… Although I am still a bit confused. Are we STILL IN THE MAZE?

-Well, I’m still watching you and I am still a voice, and you were asleep till now, when this cork thing made you react. R-E-A-C-T, such nice sounding letters.

-You don’t say… You know though, now that we’ve mentioned how mankind interacts with nature, the burnt cork scene took place at the apartment of the school janitor, a great family from Gijón, Spain. Their daughter was one of my few friends by then.

-Gijón is that miner’s town in Asturias that is sister city with Albuquerque?

-Wow, well, yes… Exactly, that’s the one. A revolutionary town. On October 6^th, 1934, a miner’s strike took big proportions and Franco’s armies were sent. When he became dictator, life was pretty tough over there, that’s why so many people came from Asturias to our Belgian province, Liège, another coal-mining region…

-Even if I appreciate their sound similarities, I would not say that extracting coal is cool.

-I agree. Maybe it’s why I had decided to wear black and red when I went to visit my Asturian friends a few years ago, after such a long time without seeing each other. I guess it was an “unconscious fashion move” seeking to pay a tribute to the earth in two of her tones: dirt from los rincones célticos, Belgium and Asturias, and the red earth of Andalucía and the Southwest… Who knows, maybe it’s also why we found those copper bowls and plates at the entrance of the maze… 

-So does this mean that red and black are definitely taking a new meaning? Are they no longer associated with fear?

-You know, dear voice, Retreat, Stillness, Silence or Lack of apparent action at some point do not always stem from fear. There is a large spectrum of emotions out there… You should watch a movie called “Inside Out”…

-The nerve! I am the one who had mentioned it to you!!! exclaims the voice.

-Oh really? Oh that’s funny. It’s not my style to go out there stealing lines, deeds, ideas or authorship, and reversing or mirroring actions, apparently taking credit for what others did, though… Or is it?

-Oh cut the crap…

-It’s not a nice way to answer my genuine question that was not at all intended to be pronounced tongue in cheek, I tease. By the way, I don’t know if you ever tried to talk with your tongue actually in your cheek.

-Only when I want to imitate your mumbling, shoots the voice. But well, let’s talk about something you, well WE love… Visuals! Because it is a very nice background on this picture in Asturias…

-Yes, I say. The Bay of Biscay, Saint Peter Church, and the Roman Baths.

-Ah, baths… And you’re on the ocean shore… So often by the water, whispers the voice.

-Yes. They say water has memory, and maybe the water wanted me to remember when I was there for the first time in this earth stroll. I can’t remember if I was 7 or 10 years old. I do know that it was more than 30 years ago!

-Yes, and when you went back more recently, many strange things came to your mind as you pondered under a huge tree made of green cider bottles. You also had a nice chat with Chicano people inside a cider barrel… Am I correct?

-Well, you know you are, since I really can’t hide anything from you, you do see it all! The way you interpret what you see, though, sometimes, is a bit messed up… Like us all, I guess… You know, I’ve been watching my pictures of that place again. And a weird time-warp vision is showing me my adult self together with my child self, holding or standing on this cider-bottle tree. I don’t really get what it means yet, though. I love the green color, and then the triangle and its prism effect producing a rainbow. I like the return of red and blue marriage in my child and adult clothing, and also, cómo no, the horses on my poncho.

-Nice Penguin Butler too! chuckles the voice. Does he have a Statue of Liberty complex of some sort?

-Haha! He’s doing what is called “escanciar la sidra”. Cider is served that way to allow the beverage to breathe… and maybe burp a little too, who knows…

-Like the burping bison, says the voice in a smile.

-Exactly… Since the process mixes air oxygen with the carbonic properties of cider, for a few seconds cider becomes soda like.

-Damn!

-What?

-Nada, chuckles the voice, it was a lousy pun because I thought of Soda Dam, Jémez…

-Ah… Heehee… Very appropriate, since when served from high above, as if it was a waterfall, the glass edge scatters the… ay, how do you call those… “Posos de la sidra”.

-What is it?

-Well it’s how we call impurities, it’s also how we describe coffee grounds: “posos de café”.

-Oh so this Statue of Liberty gesture would be the equivalent of winnowing grain, letting it fall on a cloth on the ground from a basket held above one’s head…

-Willowing grain?

-Haha! Yes, that is a great way to put concepts together, I like it. We could talk about it around a cup of chai, maybe, or coffee since posos are for coffee.

-Ah that’s a cool idea, I answer. I would be glad to do that.

-I may invite you some day, then.

-Feels good to hear… By the way, los posos de café are supposed to help in the unclogging process. I guess the “clogging feeling” was such at some point that I poured some, very enthusiastically, in my bathroom sink. But “se me fue la mano”, I had a heavy hand and used too much of it, so I ended up clogging it even more. See, a little bit like an “enough” time is required and stuff is blocked until it gets properly processed. Like we say in Belgium, it is important to know when “too much is te veel”.

-“To veal”?? You mean to give birth to a baby cow? I love you when you make up words, teases the voice. For your information, we say “to calve” though…

-To carve? I tease back. Haha, vaya dos, look at the two of us making up words as we breathe… “So the she-farmer was willowing her grain and the he-farmer was carving his dream figures when they rushed towards the cow who was vealing her beautiful baby”. Heehee… “Te veel” literally means “too much”, in Dutch…

-Oooh… “much” and “dutch” rhyme, as you would say!

-Sí, like mucho and trucho. As in “te quiero mucho, como la trucha al trucho”. I have a feeling that my mention of that fish contributed to the appearance of a trout that loves swimming in ice rivers where eagles look at their reflection on the frozen surface, maybe, I don’t know…

-I have no idea of what you’re talking about, haha!

-Maybe you’ll get it when you talk it over around a cup of chai, you know how to fix that… But we can also go to some place you like. I know you know how to surprise me with cool rincones. By the way, I like how the butler is looking and smiling at mini-me as I emerge from a water lily. Butler, Butler… Lily, Lily… Do you know where those words come from?

-No, I don’t. Yes, I do. No, I don’t. Yes, I do…

-What are you doing?

-I am being a human car blinker, tic-tac, tic-tac, tic-tac, or a pendulum, heehee.

-Oh, that conjures up another image from a movie. When Johnny (Depp) hangs from the window of the mental hospital in Benny and June… Look, it’s reflected in the snow… See, in the bottom left corner, he swings back and forth outside the window of this room where June got locked up after her “bus crisis”…

-I like this picture of you!

-I like it too. I was about to leave a place that has a huge significance for me, only that I still did not really know it or why. I had left with a leather harness…

-Oh do you still have it? 
-No, yes, no, yes, who knows.

-You’re playing pendulum too?

-I’m guessing that the leather harness may still exist but in another form that I had imagined a long time ago. Anyway, back to that green cider tree and my two me’s meeting in Asturias… Isn’t it cool to see what colors my old self and more recent self are wearing? I prefer them over the black and white of the butler…

-Why is that?

-Well, even though we may consider that each combination of colors would symbolically tend to mean the same, maybe I’m being partial to red and blue because of the black and white dream I was having when you mentioned the cork thing. By the way, I am seeing a painting by my friend Jade in the grey sky above the school...

-The electric cables forming an angle at the building seem to divide the image in three, it reminds me of the triangle behind your mini-you, and the colors of the rainbow behind the prism. Is this a school though? It looks more like a regular house to me. It’s so tiny! exclaims the voice.

-And yet it seemed so big to me, I whisper as I catch vague glimpses and sensations from the past. I am not too sure if the hallway I see in my mind’s eye is of the school or the house where my family lived when I came into this world. It was a few houses away, anyway. Rue du Viaduc, 17, and the school was Rue du Viaduc 47…

-Does “Viaduc” mean bridge as the English viaduct?

-It does. So we seem to have our rainbow bridge here, huh… Actually, later on, my family went to live on the other side of the “Viaduc”, “Rue des Carrières” or “Quarries Street”, number 67.

-Oh Wow! I like the numbers too, you lived your first days on earth behind the walls of 1+7=8=eternity, and you were schooled behind the walls of 4+7=11, like the two pillars sustaining the rainbow bridge, and then you moved to 6+7=13=1+3=4, the four winds.

-That’s so cool… Maybe it’s the reason why I have a hard time remembering which is which, hallway wise?

-Probably, and also because our entrance in the world is made through a kind of hallway as well… Oh and about your friend’s painting in the sky: is this animal part of what they would call “Ganado” in Spanish?

-No… has perdido, hahahahaa… I chuckle to myself without explaining the Spanish pun to the voice. Parece que tienes los ojos venDados, I add.

After giggling again, I consider being kind enough as to inform the voice that we say “venado” when we refer to that kind of four-legged. And taking advantage of the Spanish inspiration, I add: “Una vez que ya no son vendados, los ojos del venado “ven dados” en los dardos del sol”, ahahaha! Now I’ve introduced “dados”(dice), and “daRdos” (sunrays or arrows) to add to the cosmic fun and go on playing in life’s casino!

-What does “ojos vendados” mean?

-It means that they have blinded you with a handkerchief or similar. And “ojos VEN dados” would mean “eyes see dice”. Oh, wait, notes are asking to be played, I say as I grab my recorder.

Sol (X9) Do Sol

Sol (X9) Do

And I sing : Ne regardez pas le renard qui passe, regardez seulement quand il est passé…

-That’s one of my childhood games on that school playground. We formed a circle, looking at each other and singing this little song that means “do not look at the fox passing by, only look when fox is gone”. Fox was external to the circle, walked around it with a handkerchief in hand, and would deposit the bandana “randomly” behind someone of fox’s choice. Fox is the equivalent of your trickster coyote in my region… If you were the one chosen, you had to pick up the handkerchief, and chase fox until you caught him or her. If you failed before fox reached your spot in the circle, he or she occupied it and you did become fox.

-Ha! I like it. A bit like vampires without the bite, heehee. But am I the one who is supposed to fail to see? This is quite funny… Since you don’t seem to have noticed or understood that we’re no longer in the maze but by a little bridge over an acequia (agua, siempre agua). Before falling asleep, you were determined to find the green aka coming back home in a green valley, but maybe you had heard a wrong word and it was a green hallway, you know, just like me with Ganado and Venado por culpa de mis ojos vendados.

-It’s hilarious because when you lose your temper or are at least a bit annoyed or offended (yes, it happens) you are not in control of everything and therefore you let important information come to the surface, bam!, after working hard to conceal it, like you’ve been working on your Spanish big time!

-Who, me?

-No, my shadow… Anyway, back to colors… Yes, I was looking for the green station, and then I thought I had found it, but it seems I hadn’t, huh?

-Well, the whole maze was actually green so maybe it means green was there all the time. Maybe it means green is everywhere, and especially in us, where we fail to search, though. So close and yet so well hidden.

-Wow… That sounds deep.

And I laugh again: as deep as « Quand je te vois mon cœur galope, mon petit cœur qui fait clop clop… »

-What is that now?

-“When I see you my heart goes wohooo, my little heart that runs to you”… más o menos.

-You’re silly…

-Not me, Poet Smurf is, the author of the rhyme, I smile. Soooo…  Clooose… Oooz... You know, speaking of green, there’s one TV show I enjoy watching. It is a new version of Oz, called Emerald City, and two of the locations where the series was shot are quite familiar to me: Barcelona, and another location set in the Granada Province. I had had a strange vision nearby, in a village called Aldeire, when I leaned against the trunk of a tree by the river. Anyway, the location is Calahorra.

-Coal and Gold? asks the voice.

-Huh? I ask somewhat bewildered.

-I don’t know, explains the voice. I was working on my Spanish... Calahorra sounded like it had some coal and oro…

-I love you so much when you find new, hidden meanings to what regular etymology is supposed to hold. You know, it sounds good. And it’s funny because if we break it down it becomes “cal ahorra”, which would mean “limestone saves (as in saves money) or spares”. Weird. Actually, I would say that Calahorra might come from Qalat al Hurra, castle of the Free Woman. Wow… I am having an a-ha moment here… Calahorra – Qalat al Hurra & Palacio de Dar al Ho/urra. The last one is a little palace in the Moorish quarter of the Albayzin in Granada, where the wife of Mulay Hassan was forced to retire when the sultan repudiated her and turned a Christian slave into his Queen. Estrella de la Mañana, he called her when she had converted to Islam… Once I visited that little house, and as I was watching the Alhambra from a small window, I remember that I had felt empathy for Fátima, mother of Boabdil, wondering what she thought as she looked across the… wow! Darro River… Río de Oro. A-Ha moment #2. You were right, voice! Back then I felt for her although I don’t really appreciate her. She’s the one who exacerbated the tensions in the Kingdom because of her bitterness. She pushed her son, who was a poet and humanist, to turn against his father, and the internal dissensions finally ended up in tragedy for the whole family, dynasty, and Moorish Spain, since Granada was lost to the Christians, which had other dire consequences for people practically all over the world, and especially in America when Columbus was given the, how would you call it, green beam??? to go and “discover” the New World. Gulp, double gulp… Anyway, in Granada they call Fátima “honrada”, honorable. But I don’t think that war and belittling one’s son and criticizing him for weeping like a woman after losing the city is better than an aging king wishing to be happy with the one he loved.

-Well, I guess she was also thinking that it was not very honorable to repudiate her.

-Good point, voice. It’s true. And it leads me to another linguistic A-Ha moment, since, of course, Fátima was the official “honrada”, and maybe also free or “hurra” in the sense that she had never been a slave. She actually took great pride in calling herself a descendant of the prophet. However, I can’t help thinking that the derogatory term “zorra” (she fox which means “slut” or “bitch” in contemporary Spanish) may be a hint of what she would think many times in her own language when thinking of Estrella de la Mañana while staring at the Alhambra from her repudiation’s lot…

-Why have you remembered that?

-I don’t know for sure, but an image of a woman in pink keeps popping up. And I am not fond of pink, I prefer red, so where were we? Ah oui… The latest adaptation of Oz. There is this powerful scene at Calahorra, when the heroin, clad in red, is trying to grasp her apparent destiny in Oz and is invited to enter a twister… again, in her quality of “Mistress new Mistress”.

-What?

-I know, it’s how the black slave of the former Bruja del Sur calls her, because she has gold and rubies “popping” on her hands whenever she is under pressure or feeling great emotion, just like the deceased witch, whom she accidentally “killed” a first time when she landed on her when the twister spit her, and then killed again when she answered the witch’s question about how guns functioned. She just told her that one pulls the trigger… Oops, it blew the witch’s brain.

-Oh I love this image, says the voice in awe. I have seen really similar scenes in a cartoon that I like, about the Avatar…

-Oh so you watched the burping bison boy too!

-Well of course… It’s really uncanny how both scenes from the series and the cartoon look alike!

-Oh wow, such control of the elements, it’s amazing, I say in awe.

-Yes. You know what popped in my mind?

-Well, no, so pop the “misty mystery” bubble open…

-I felt like seizing the tornado or water twister and putting it upside down!

-Oh, that’s great, I should have done that en el Corral del Carbón, haha…

-Now I am not dreaming, you do talk about coal, don’t you?

-Yes… I was back in Granada in my thoughts, and I remember when I could not enter el Corral courtyard (where they would store coal as a last activity, hence its name Corral del Carbón, but it was a caravansary in the first place). The thing is that I had been given a vanilla ice cream and therefore had to stay outside, again, because it was forbidden to enter the monument with food. Now I’m having retrospective thoughts and I imagine myself sticking the vanilla cone, cream first, on the head of that rude guardian who prohibited me to enter with an ice cream… WHICH WAS NOT EVEN MINE in the first place… But I guess there was a reason for it to happen that way.

-Maybe it is a reminder of that seagull who stole your ice cream when you were facing Alcatraz?

-Ah… that would explain a few things in some threads that still escaped me in the mysterious paths of Great Spirit. By the way, the little pool at the center of the Corral is where I had started an imaginary journey for the magic of storytelling. It followed the course of many bodies of water across the world, starting from India and ending in the Southwest, of course, by el Río Grande, with Rudolfo Anaya’s Serafina, a Pueblo Shahrazad.

-See, I told you that we would deal with coal… I see that you have your vanilla bomb ready to be dropped from atop the balcony.

-You know, it would actually have been great to make creative use of it, like Spirit with his icicle in that cute movie about the so-called untamable stallion of the Cimarron!  What remains for being figured out is on whose head I would have chosen to let the vanilla land, though… Because after all, the guardian was only doing his job.

-Do you have other specific victims in mind?

-Oh yes. Could you choose a more accurate noun than “victim” though? I have two other targets in mind. Oh, heehee, the good and bad angels are fighting inside of me…

-Wow! Says the voice. Your mind is crowded.

-Yes, Snowy, Captain Haddock, Batman, Odin with Hugin and Munin, the Kiraman Katibin… Well, these last examples only take note of what is being done, said and thought… They don’t try to influence their human…

-And what would they take note of in the case of your unleashed creative imagination?

Well… since flying monkeys have the audacity to try to turn their horses into fake unicorns, I think the flying monkey would be a good recipient of the upside-down cone. Here! “You wanna see my snack?” ¡Toma! Aaaaaah… It feels good. Ea, turned that rider into a Spanish Penitente hiding under a capirote. Liberación. Una mueca y adiós.

-Why is it that I’m thinking of Amélie Poulain? asks the voice.

-Because you remember the fantastic scene of the frustrated soccer fan. Well, it was well employed to ruin his pleasure. Amélie was terrified when she thought, because of what he had told her, that she was the one responsible for all the catastrophes in the world. I am not saying that I don’t believe in the butterfly effect, but I am more partial to butterflies in the stomach…

-I think I am too. Are you vengeful like Amélie?

-No, but I need to be heard, and when too much ice cream is being loaded in my hands and stuck in my mouth, I wait till they melt a bit and I express it later.

-Maybe the Penitente was a prop in this life, and had been suffering in another life.

-Yes, maybe, and I don’t wish for anybody to suffer. And it means me neither.

-Maybe through suffering a bit, we are more open to cosmic understandings.

-Yes, as long as the tricks played on us do not become a life-long habit. Plus, I really do believe that we are not defined by our past but by our actions in the present. So after the pain and anger, a little explanation is necessary, y luego pelitos a la mar.

-I like the other images of Amélie. Because she played tricks on her father for the good cause.

-It is true. I loved his sentence “je ne comprends pas” (I don’t get it). I felt his pain, haha… Because I won’t stop until I understand something. The feeling when you do… Immense.

-You know, when you mentioned the ice cream, for some reason I thought of candles, and that other image of the candles lit before the TV set made my heart a bit sad. Or like you would say, it had black sap in it.

-Oh, it makes me think of the black tar sand walls of Edison’s studio.

-Was it like the black and white dream that you were having?

-No, although it is somehow similar since even though the protagonist knew it was like a movie that was being played before her eyes, she could not help being extremely wounded.

-Like those fighting cats? Asks the voice trying to joke but whose tone denotes some uneasiness.

-Well, you know that I don’t like fights of any kind, especially if they are induced fights.

-But maybe such fights have other functions too, like rekindling memories of ghost, to invite you in the dance, like those Lakota men turned into performers.

-Now I understand, yes. But back to Amélie, little tricks and reactions or lack thereof... imagine if Amélie had been receiving heart blow after heart blow in a short amount of time and was finally to have an enjoyable moment that she had been yearning for: she was the one flying instead of her friend the flight attendant, but then her travel partner was cold as ice (cream) because of a little scheme and mission in mind. Well, the result would have been even more below zero temperatures in Amélie’s soul, and her heart would have felt like a stone. Although I know what you mean, and I know how it can feel to think that one’s huge work in the shadows is not seen, understood or appreciated.

-It feels good to hear.

-My pleasure. The mention of stones conjures up another image of that show I’m watching, Emerald City. Science fights Magic, and the magic trick is how stones get together and become a dancing man.

-Like our stones at the beginning of the walk maze.

-Yup… And then I thought of another type of Ludo from Labyrinth, all made of stone himself. He tried his best to save an entire village from cataclysm, but because he cannot save the church the villagers go all crazy and start attacking him.

-Haha! His face says it all… My face looks like that too sometimes, and when it happens there’s a serendipitous song being all rude on the radio to speak for me and my anger.

-It’s less destructive than in the little cartoon, I smile.

-Oops, the village is gone.

-By the sea that cleanses everything.

-In that TV show, Emerald City, what was the scientific trick competing with the stone man?

-Electricity… Hey… actually that could be the second meaning of E. City…

-I agree, emeralds are green, green is the color of the heart in the chakras that invited us to walk our maze, and electric shocks sometimes revive a heart.

-Or finish to kill it, I say… OK, you’re right, I agree. So E. City in the eyes of E, could also mean that… Edison is in Oz too! And other inventors as well, by the way, in close relationship with a certain Wild Wild West. Check out the incredible device of the flying monkey… I love that kind of “quotes” in films.

-“If you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”… whispers the voice.

-With your “ice”, I smile… You know, when discussing this quote with other people, I realized that I was the only one who understood it in a different way. Instead of taking it literally (of course he said “your eyes” because the man in the fridge had actually built those eyes) I thought that it was another way to say that one can have experiences of others, tapping into their own senses, and therefore see what other eyes saw. Psychics can do that. Blade Runner is so amazing. And then again, always going counter current (with no set intention to do so but yes, ending up swimming upstream like a salmon), I thought that the title also could be interpreted in a very sweet way. Because even though I know that “blade” was supposed to mean something sharp, I prefer to interpret blade as in a blade of grass.

-What, then, would the blade runner tiptoeing in the dew look like? asks the voice.

-Oh that’s an easy one, if we’re in the dew, it’s because the runner tiptoes on dew-claws.

-Dew, what a poetic word. It rhymes with blue.

-Yes, like the blue elk, who came to meet a new-born baby who could not talk. They were one, and when the elk went galloping forever on his own happy hunting grounds, he gave his human friend a precious tool, to help him expressing what he held deep inside.

-Oh, you know that tale?

-I do…

-From now on I will nickname that elk “Breb”, as in “Blade Runner Elk Blue”. Actually, the end of Blade Runner seems pretty sweet to me and the scenery could resemble what I see when I imagine the Happy Hunting Grounds.

-I am seeing it… with your eyes, I smile.

-Hey! Do you realize that the ice cream on the flying monkey’s horse is a little unicorn’s big horn? It actually conjures up a very important image in the movie.

-Of course I realize it, I had already said so... Pay attention, voice, heehee! I think I know which of the seven versions of the movie you mention. It’s the one in which Deckard dreams of the unicorn, and then when he plans to flee with the replicant…

-She has a name, interrupts the voice.

-She has, but she was made to repeat the memories of another woman, which were implanted in her replicant brain, so I’ll just call her a replicant, if you don’t mind…

 -Sorry. Although you have to acknowledge that these memories that she made hers did help in the process of…

-Not in the way you mean or think, I interrupt back. But that’s fine. So if I may finish my sentence, Deckard finds an origami unicorn as a silent message from the policeman, played by James Olmos.

-Yes, it’s the way the policeman has found to tell Deckard that he has seen his dreams.

-Exactly, so everybody I’ve been talking to was all ecstatic and awe-struck at their own perspicacity when they interpreted it as: Deckard is a replicant because the dream was implanted in his programmed memory. Well, that’s a way to see it. BUT… what if it actually means that life is a dream, and that everyone can tap into another’s dream when they still know how to dance the dream that connects us all? It took me some time to first accept and then really grasp the profound meaning of this. But I think I have a better idea now. Shamans heal and do astral travel in dreams.

-And the policeman also tells Deckard that he “has his back” because he will lie about the she-replicant’s fate, stating that she died. But he says it in a way that sounds prophetic, as if, like a shaman, he had seen the future, only that it is a future that he will build in the mind’s construct of those he is supposed to work for…

-Exactly. And what if our interpretation of the meaning of Blade Runner, the one who runs in the dew on his delicate dew claws, was way closer to the utopia of a shamanic and nature-oriented reality, out there in the off-world, letting some hints of its existence peek into the dystopia of that nightmarish earth depicted in the movie (which is supposed to be happening only TWO years from now, if I may say as a ‘kind’ reminder).

-Right… Wow, so for you Blade Runner would be very similar to Brave New World… I like your interpretation, actually I share many of your views on it. And I prefer that kind of “what if” over some other “what if” that sometimes tortured me and didn’t let me sleep at night, be they “what if” from a very distant past or from one closer to the here and now.

-Well you know, I literally sleep for two, so I’m sure I could lend you, no, rather “give you freely” some of my sound sleep hours… How about sleeping in the orange glow of a lion’s moon, surrounded by cute pumpkins teaching us to grow? That’s the image I came up with when I saw an illustration by Kristana Rodanas to illustrate the elk tale…

-Oh, that’s a smashing image!

-You mean your spitting image?

-No, I was trying to adapt to your Europeanness and I used a British adjective…

-Oh but you know that I’m not too fond of the British accent though… Who knows, maybe one day I dreamed of two women bowing before a British Queen who called them little girls, in such a condescending tone that it felt like smashing such smashing tone, haha!

-Haha! I like it. And you know, one day, I myself dreamed of smashing turnips when I was very angry at the chores I was asked to perform. I smashed so hard that it was impossible to retrieve anything edible. Poor turnip, though, now that I think of it. But we need to let go of our rage somehow…

-Somehow, yes. But our pumpkins are awesome, not smashing.

-Cute orange tones, kissed by the sun. Speaking of colors, you keep on mentioning the black and white dream but you never tell me what it was made of.

 -That’s true. And we first mentioned it when we talked about the burnt cork eyes, am I correct? Well I will tell you about the dream, but let me think of a last similarity with Blade Runner. Because the dark pit around my child’s eyes reminds me of those Black Eyes of Pris… I preferred her as a siren emerging from the deep blue abyss…

-Pris? asks the voice.

-Oh don’t play dumb, Voice. Of course, PRIS, Daryl Hannah. Don’t you remember her horrible-looking white face with dark circles around her eyes, when she pops from under the bridal veil and attempts to kill Rick Deckard in Blade Runner?

-Oh yes, I remember that scene, yes. Also when Sebastian shows his world to Pris for the first time.

-Isn’t it weird that Pris the replicant is the one saying that her new friend must be lonely? I mean, after all, she’s supposed to be a machine, with no feelings…

-Oh but she and other beings like her have acquired the capacity to mimic feelings, says the voice.

-Yes she did. And you know, I found Sebastian the toy maker very moving too. I think his mind was brilliant, and he was the only one showing true compassion towards all the replicants. Of course Pris and her friend try to fool him and manipulate him. Maybe it is something that happened in that character’s life in the past, therefore he decides to make dolls so that his friends can be just as he fancies them.

-Any relation with the maze?

-Well, I think that sometimes we have our own Pris sitting on our shoulders a little bit too heavily, adding a new level to the game as we walk the maze, or maybe the chess board. Maybe ours is not as flexible as that Pris character from Blade runner, though…

-That’s what I thought, yes. Maybe our Pris will die of old age, or maybe she’ll change her name…

-Yes, whichever we decide would work. And we can always keep some of Sebastian’s toys as long as we rename Pris, maybe. You know, like in that story of a jaguar who totally changed his character once he got rid of a bad name... or maybe it was a leopard. Heehee, I think the symbolic meaning of tracking one's shadows in the teachings of Miguel Ruiz is influencing me... Anyway, it was a beautiful black animal who was hurt by human actions of the past and wanted a better name.

-I like that. It would also work for a country. If it is given a bad name, bad things might happen to it, so the naming ceremony is extremely important.

-Yes. The choice of stories is important too. See, like the ones you chose as you tried to wake me up. That cork episode happened in a place devoted to Saint Hubert, who saw a cross in the antlers of a magical deer. And it seems that my own messenger from the Me-We Gate is back… When he’s around, Magic takes a hand…

-Magic takes YOU BY THE hand…

-Yes, it does. I am also extremely glad that the castle feels different now. And I am way closer than back in the day when I first opened the Me-We Gate.

-So the castle is in Albuquerque?

-No, it’s in me, and also in the North that I found back, heehee… Although now that you mention this quirky city, I’ve just come to the realization that it may take its name from cork as well. One of the etymologies of Albuquerque is Albur Quercus, or White Oak in Latin… That’s why it was spelled with 2 R’s: AlbuRquerque, before some monolingual clerk (note that I did my best not to make it rhyme with jerk, oops, too late) could not pronounce it and decided to hush an R. Other people say it could also be derived from Arabic: “al-barquq”.

-Let me guess: el barco, the ship? asks the voice who has a hard time concealing true passion for etymology.

-Well, I like it, because actually its bark could be considered a little boat, and “coque” means the hull of a boat, but “al-barquq” gave “albaricoque” in Spanish from Spain, which means apricot or apricot tree. Like the one in my yard… You know, it’s weird, because in Spanish from here they call the fruit “chabacano”, which in Spain means vulgar! Tell me about a wrong name... Funny, why did I see it as a peach tree a while ago?

-Well, both come from Asia and belong to the “rose family”.

-Yes, plus it’s never black or white but a more subtle shade of grey, or so they say. And yes, I know, it’s been forever that I mentioned my black and white dream and I never tell you about it. Let’s just say that it all happened in a wintry scenery, and I was walking in black and white waves decorated with lace, where mythic birds flew and dove as I moved.

I carried a little basket and many other things. An old lady told me, out of the blue, “you’re a blessing to us all”. So I told her that I did not know what to say being shown so much kindness, so she said “just answer but of course!”. Then a few steps away, a couple from Colorado asked me about the meaning of the fires all around us, I gave an answer that had to do with eternity… But I said that I still had a lot to learn. And then a fire keeper standing between a huge and a tiny fire kind of froze my moves, and his helpers too, so everything flipped over and I slipped and fell as I passed by a cemetery.

-Maybe the ancestors were re-living part of their traumas through you.

-Yes, maybe… Anyway, someone asked me if I was ok and I said physically yes… And I left and drove with not much of a purpose, I saw a statue by which loudspeakers played the most beautiful notes of a non-traditional Christmas carol, and when the cello and flute made me cry, I thought I’d better move if I did not want frozen icicles on my cheeks, so I crossed that space and ended up sitting on a little bench, by a house that felt like that dark pit we’ve been mentioning several times. I then had a flash of the summer, when I was at Meow Wolf, the house of the eternal return, and penetrated the parallel world through a big fireplace.

-That’s a good dream…

-Hmmm, well. Its symbolic meaning is good, yes, this is the conclusion I came up to. And since then the fireplace showed me a lot, that’s for sure. Sooooo, let’s choose to stick to that, and also the white snow in that dream reminds me of another winter tale, of a long time and space ago.

-I love winter tales! Please tell me about it!

-OK… Once upon a time in Andalusia, a Caliph was admired by all. Once he visited a king in Granada, who was the father of three beautiful daughters whose poetic names were Azahara or orange blossom, Yasmine or jasmine blossom, and Zayneb or desert flower. The Caliph fell in love with Azahara and took her with him to Córdoba. His love was so big that he built a palace just for her, and he named it Medina Azahara (Azahara City). But despite all his efforts, Azahara looked sad sometimes. Only when the two took the time to talk about it, is when she could tell her beloved husband that something made her sad : she peeked out of her window every morning, trying to see the highest peak of Sierra Nevada, back in Granada, but she could not, and she missed it.

-Do you miss it too?

-Not at all, the story is not finished, listen, it’s a tribute to the Caliph’s dedication… So the Caliph came up with the most wonderful idea: he planted almond trees in their Sierra, so that the blooming trees would honor her name and so that her Caliph would magically make it snow on Azahara’s new home. Azahara, since that day, never failed to see all the efforts her Caliph had taken in making their world beautiful, adopting her codes and what talked to her.

-Oh that’s a beautiful story. It makes me feel so good, because sometimes the stone man story felt real too, or an adaptation I saw of it in a little cat cartoon that you love. See, I am like that Caliph too…

-Haha! Oh yes, poor kitty, all these efforts and the selfish she-cat still pouts and gives herself airs when he hunted a mouse for her… Of course you are like that Caliph too… And I wonder if a film I’ve seen recently was also inspired by the Caliph story. Look at its reflection in the snow…

-When one sees that all their little stratagems finally have been acknowledged it feels like heaven or wonderland, yes…

-Yes.

-Oh give me your recorder, please!

And in a gesture as swift as the one that had ended up with me holding a vanilla ice cream cone, my recorder flies and starts to play: la do la mi re do sol mi do si (X5) do la… and again, and again, and again, until I sing along “what can I say except you’re welcome, for the tide, the sun, the sky… Hey it’s ok, it’s ok, you’re welcome, I’m just an ordinary demi-god…”

-Yes, yes, yes! She got it! screams the voice.

-I scream, you scream… we all scream for recognition, I laugh…

-Happy? asks the voice… I hope I never disappoint you…

-You got some nerve, rascal, but yes, I’m happy… Although I still have a few things to do, ancestors are telling me so, they all speak in female voices, so let’s do this: do go fly a kite and wait for me as I sail to the green hallway on this little boat with a white tree in it, ok?

-Ok, but don’t take forever as usual though… Anyway I’ll hover around, byyyyyye!

(To be continued: here)