He, the old wanderer, had found a lost continent.
He dreamed of a new world.
And she had entered it, gone so long ago that she had forgotten who she had been.
But he often mumbled, to whom might have been listening: “Too many people around, too indifferent, self-absorbed.”
And so I write about this old man, however brief, a wanderer I met, and I will fill in the gaps in his life, which was more his world of dreams than what we consider reality.
For the old tramp, his dream came true for him.
The more he dreamed, the more he took on an enraged realism.
Outside this world of dreams, the world for him was ugly and disgusting.
“Where the truth was, it was what people wanted it to be at a given time, and it was never fully revealed,” he murmured.
“And simulation was worshiped, like Baal,” he murmured.
Consequently, in this nebulous species of dream life he found a new world in which he could live, day and night.
Disassociated with earthly existence, his struggle for survival, the continuation, while his other world became more real, deeper and deeper.
When he was awake, what he ate was for the most part, what he rarely encountered, during those last well-intentioned and forgotten days: that was: rubbish thrown from the open windows of the city’s apartment buildings!
His mind was made up of thoughts and fantasies.
His waking life was a life of images in the brain, he preferred the inner dream.
It was as if something was chaining him.
…
In his alternate world there were enchanted hills, gardens that grew flowers that looked as bright and red as the sun, blinding sapphires, mountains that sang to the moon, whispering seas, cabins with roofs of bronze and gold.
And he himself, mounted on a white horse with a carapace, crossed carved bridges, white paths, watching the birds, bees and butterflies swarm the fields around him, placidly.
Along the cedar forests, he bounded his horse past the ivory gates of handsome cabins and town halls with high vaulted towers.
Always trying not to wake up, or if he did, to drink more wine or his choice of drug – whatever he could find – to supplement his habit of slipping back into REM sleep, and delving into the world of hashish, for a most eloquent episode, one to which he was born, and to emerge from the other into which he was thrown.
One in which he preferred to exist was not the one in which he was born.
If he had been woken up, all he saw was a terrible aurora from a stagnant city in ruins, a muddy garbage filled creek filled with reeds and vermin!
People stared at him through their windows, choking on carbon dioxide from passing cars and trucks.
Besides, he knew that he would quickly tire of the rawness of emotions and the monotony of people, and they would never understand the meaning of his life.
And then, once in reality, in full, clean, sober reality, where would the satisfaction or fulfillment come from?
What he had left in the past, back in his dashing dreamland.
Wasn’t this in itself the antidote?
Old popular doctrines, inflexible cures, most of the cures were confused thoughts.
He wanted to escape, or find his equal, like Gilgamesh who sought Enkidu, out of boredom.
Nobody took the time to find out the secret wells of his life, the ones that described him, he had a room for each one, hung in aspirated colors.
And then one day, out of nowhere, a crack appeared, an abyss appeared, a fissure opened, like an earthquake, in the deep recesses of his dreams!
He fell down, down, far, far down into its abyss.
And there was his greatest achievement, he found it, the Radiant City of Crystals and Pearls. “This,” she whispered, “is where I will stay and live, this is where I belong!”
This magical world so vivid, once in fragments now all together, the associations in her mind fell into a sight, a breathless expectation, one that was insatiable.
…
He felt a tug on his shoulder, it resembled a python trying to get him out of the city.
“No, no,” he yelled, but no one heard him.
The old woman tried with all her effort to wake up the Old Tramp, lying on a damp mattress thrown away like garbage, and full of ants, ticks and bugs, and white worms, in a vacant lot, inside the big city, a metropolis.
Lo, then a policeman came over, took his pulse, he wasn’t sure.
It took a long, long ice to move, in the old bum lying!
She even patted him on the face to wake him up.
But the old man was warm, feeling the sea breeze lull him, watching the clouds drift over a cliff in the village (in fantasy land).
One of several curious strangers who had crowded around this limp body said in a loud cry, “Someone please take him to a hospital!” though he reserved the right to back down.
Then the police officer announced that he was dead.
Saying to the old woman who had beckoned him: “I’ve seen him here before, he was a dreamer, a drunk, a drug addict; although he found something in all this”, and hesitated to say what. she thought to herself, as the old woman patiently waited to hear her final remarks, “quiet and lasting beauty, only comes in dreams… what the real world threw away long ago!”
For those seductive moments, the old wanderer gazed at the region where the sea meets the sky.
He refused to let the python wake him up or let the bugs slap him in the face.
And all those who in the present knew what had happened, wherever, they also continued on their way, wherever.
#5286/6-18-2016