Myths of Origin (25 page)

Touching it, I breathed deeply and trusted my weight to its length. Instead of a spider I then hung in the cavernous tower like the rope to a grotesque bell. And slowly, hand over hand, I raised myself up along the green stalk until the fourth level passed beneath me and I could see the tracks of ancient footprints in the dust. I let go shakily and stood in the center of a room which was almost intact. I had come through a large hole in the floor but other than that chasm, the wood was smooth and deeply oiled.

And in the center of the grained wood lay a book.

It was strangely bound, not in a scroll as I knew books to be, but clasped in a leather casing which was not black, but dark from the sweat-thick attentions of many hands. It had no design or picture, it had only the clutch of cream-yellow paper within its jaws.

It bulged slightly, a fat heart on the upbeat.

On the cover it read in yellowing ink:

This is the Book of Dreams.

Thunder Suppresses His Voice

What is a Riddle? It is not merely a word game, or a puzzle, or a even, truly, a question. It is a series of locks which open only onto each other, in a great circle that leads back to a Truth—and this is the secret I tell you now on the great wall of Thebes: the Truth is always in the Question, never in the answer. All conceivable truths are in a single question. If I ask a boy-child to tell me my name, I have already told him the ancient truth that a name holds power. I have told him that I am more than a monster, for I possess a name. I have told him that in names lies the path to freedom, not only of the body, but of the ineffable Self. All this I have told him, before I ever demanded such a simple repayment as an answer, if only he could listen. There is not nearly so much gold in the answer, which is nothing more than a word.

What is a Riddle?

It is a box full of satisfactions. It never fails the questioner or the respondent. When it is opened, there is a soft intake of breath, when it remains closed, breath itself is stopped.

And on this box is written:

This is the Book of Dreams.

Burrowing Beetles Wall Up Their Doors With Earth

I am afraid to open it. A closed book is beautiful, because anything can be written in it, and so everything is. All the stories that ever were—love, honor, death, lust, wisdom—every word written is contained inside it as long as the I-that-is-Ayako does not reach forward to open the cover and reveal what
is
actually written there. It can only be disappointing. Perhaps that is why it bulges, so full of what it
could
be. The curve of potential, like a pregnant woman’s belly.

An open book is ugly, it is splayed open like a whore. It can only be what it is.

I am afraid of it, I do not want to touch it. It does not fill me with light like the Stone or the goat’s milk. What do I need with a book of dreams when dreams people my body as though I were a capital-city?

Waters Dry Up

River is worried. He sees that my dream-tears continue, falling with more speed, pooling around my shoulders in a salty ring. River is usually the first to understand. He will not tell Mountain until he is sure he cannot punish me alone. He set the sun on me to dry them, but the tears are alive now, they run their course like the mewling children of River do, heedless and wild. They come and come and come.

Within myself, I am smiling.

He himself tries to wash them away, frothing under their weight, blue on blue. But they sink within him and he cannot move to stop up my eyes like wine bottles. I am heavier, heavier by far. My salts scald and bruise him—I am warmed by his screams.

He sets the wind to dry them, but they can only soak up the thick waters, and send them earthward again as rain. The dams begin to swell up with my sorrows, the sea is black and deep. Great storms erupt on the hipbones of Mountain, drenching his gray skin with borrowed tears.

He set the glaciers on me to freeze them, but they are hot and thick, rolling over my body in a great gray slough, over my dark-treed belly, the skin of boughs that covers my secret womb, and on this skin is written in the sap and tears:

This is the Book of Dreams.

Wild Geese Come as Guests

I dream I have found the last of him. In the deep river currents where no reeds grow it floated like an abandoned cradle. I am ready now, to take the river into me. I do not want to, but now there can be no more delays, and I can see the colors of the water changing. I am draped in his body—intestines, blood, leg, clavicle, cheek, eyes, jaw, scalp, hands, skin, spleen, heart, skull. I am dressed for the ball, for a second wedding, for the insensate ritual of taking my dream-husband’s corpse into myself.

I know what is coming, what the river will leave in me like sandy deposits in the delta. I am resigned, I want it done. I want to leave it on the banks and never think on it again. The hawk-headed child looms large in my vision. I can feel its feathers already prickling the walls of my womb.

I stifle revulsion as I clean the last of the dream-husband’s organs in the cool river, which has inundated the valley and given life to the amaranth crops. I am the body of the sky, and I will give birth to light from light. I cannot tell if it is still a dream. If the child I will take from his mute body will be a dream-son or if he will be real. I am the amaranth, and I am the river.

I hold the last of him in my hands, mottled gray and shot with hardened blood. And on its length is written:

This is the Book of Dreams.

Sparrows Dive Into the Water Becoming Clams

Metamorphosis. It is a long line of bellies, chained together flesh-wise, circling each other in a blood-black smear. A book is a belly, too. It is full of dark, nameless things decaying into each other, dissolving in acid, jostling for position. Kingfishers dive into the water and become women; women dive into the earth and become books.

What woman was this book before it grew its leather wings? I do not want to disturb her, to open her and pry out her secrets with a knife.

I was breathing heavily, trying to escape the book without moving. Perhaps peace lay in it, perhaps not. I did not want to know. I wanted my bean patch and my first floor. I wanted River and Mountain sleeping beside me in the dark.

I knew then I would not open it. I knew my story, I did not need the book. I would not harm it, its capacity for infinite wisdom, by reading what was truly there. I was not sure, I reasoned, that I
could
read any longer.

But I could not stop looking at it, the vulgarity of its bulging cover. I wanted it, like a barren woman wants a child. I would leave it, let it remain quiet and alone, as I have been for so long. Let the scholars in Kyoto pour over pages until their eyes dribble onto their cheeks. I took my lessons from Gate and Moth, Goat and River, and Mountain, above all my patron Mountain, who held me in his arms and whispered lullabies.

I stood before the book. I was the anatomy of a
no
. All of me cried out in rejection of the black heart of the dream-pagoda.

I had to escape it. Up. Up onto the fifth floor, where there would be no terrible book to make my sinews tear themselves like so much paper.

Chrysanthemums Are Tinged Yellow

I dream that I begin to seduce the city. I touch its walls lightly, with a fingertip. I brush my lips over the ramparts. I am better now, I know how to make the fire last. I know how to take my pleasure from a city.

Before the Gate a dream-battle is raging. Armor has fallen in the dirt made mud by the glut of black blood, bodies are piled up to be burned. Two men are slashing at each other, their faces turned into masks of beasts, theatre-clay with fleshy ribbons. The rest of the army looks on, waiting on the outcome. The only sounds are the cheap, hollow ring of swords, the dull thud of blows landing on leather-wrapped shields, and the hush of my body moving over the bricks of the city.

My nipples dip into the fountains and they are dried, my hair falls over a siege tower and it crashes to the frothing earth. I laugh and laugh. What they battle over is already mine. I have claimed it.

And on the great carved gate is written:

This is the Book of Dreams.

The Wolf Sacrifices the Beasts

The fifth floor was perfect. I simply climbed up a ladder which had not a single rung broken, and stood in the center of a room with no cracks in the floor, no pockmarks on the walls—even the paintings were untouched. They showed strange and terrible things—a beast sitting atop a low wall, half lion and half eagle, with the face of a woman. A woman tied to the earth with a green-walled palace built in her mouth. A woman standing in a river much vaster than my little creek, with the severed organs of some nameless man draped over her body. A woman whose skin flamed red, sighing onto a city which caught flame from her breath.

And in the corner stood a small Fox, beautifully auburn and cream-furred, with pert ears and a gentle snout, sitting on her haunches with an expression on her face which in the world of foxes must have passed for a smile.

“Why did you not open the book?” she asked softly, in a cultured, harmonious voice which rustled through the room like a veil blown from the shoulders of some pretty child.

“I did not want to disturb it,” I gulped, suddenly ashamed at my cowardice.

“If I brought it here now, would you change your mind?”

I considered it, thought back on the dark oils of its cover. “No. I would rather you tell me lessons. I would rather Gate spoke to me under the stars.”

“But there are no lessons in it. Only a story.”

“My story?” I whispered.

“In a way. It is the story of your dream-women. In it are written their names.”

The Fox scratched at her cupped red ear. “They have no names. Only the hermit-Ayako has a name,” I protested.

“It is only that you do not know their names. But if you do not open the book, you will not finish the dreams, you will not reach the sea. Do you not recall what the Sphinx said? All women are one woman. If you do not seek out the shells they leave behind, you will not shed your own.” The Fox trotted over and stood before me.

“Who are you? Why are you here at the top of my tower?” I rasped, my voice dry as rice in the sun.

“I have many names, as you do. This is my pagoda, I have always been here. I am the Stone, too. Once it bore my face. I am Mercy, I am Compassion. I am the flowing water that carries you. You cannot step into me twice, and yet, each of your footsteps drags four behind them. I am nothing more than a door through which you will pass. I am here to show you the End.”

Foliage Turns Yellow And Falls

Outside the dream-pagoda, leaves drifted down with thoughtless grace, green, gold, brown. The air had sharpened, swallows sang down the sun.

“Is this the dream of the Fox? Or the dream of the Fifth Floor?” I asked.

“In all probability. I have no revelations for you, only the peace that comes with understanding. You did not strive to reach the top of the pagoda—you fled to the pinnacle without thought of ascension. Because you did not seek it, it is yours. You dive into the water and become a clam, a pheasant, a book. This is about metamorphosis—this is about solitude. Look how you have built your temple! Look how high and bright the spires!” The Fox laughed, a deep sound in her throat like skin being stretched over a drum. “You must listen to the dream of the Sphinx. She tells the truth—she cannot do otherwise. Her body carries the physiognomy of true things—only a true answer will ease her hunger. Thus, she is emptiness. Not the expanse of pure emptiness in which wisdom grows, but the gnawing absence of knowledge, that which burns.”

“But are all these women me?” I begged, confused.

“All women are one woman. You are the I-that-is. They are the I-that-is-possible. Open the book, and follow the voice-threads where they lead. Out of the black silk harvest they came, and they are yours. You have a responsibility to them. The multiplied “I” can not be reduced back into itself until all its light-paths have been followed. The Sphinx would say this has already happened. If it has, it should not be difficult for you.”

And the book lay between us, bulging and dark, promising. The Fox retained her beatific face; I opened the cover with a careful hand and read these things:

Insects Tuck Themselves Away

If all women are one woman who has already lived out each of her infinite possible lives, if all their stories are already told, if, in fact, all possible events have already occurred, the one infinitely copied photon has completed all conceivable pathways, then we approach not only the unfortunate conclusion that all Riddles have already been asked and answered, but must accept that we reside in the Wasteland of Quantum Exhaustion.

“Do you like that, Oedipus? I am delivering a paper on the subject at a conference in Alexandria next month,” the dream-Sphinx mused, and Prince Oedipus picked his teeth with a sliver of bone. He is bored.

In the Wasteland of Quantum Exhaustion, the woman-who-is-all-women would stand at a central point, one of her possible selves would be a commonality around which other possible selves would revolve. Of course, each of the women in then in and of herself a commonality, and thus there is no center per se to the system, only an infinitely expanding series of centers, which negates the idea of a center altogether. As we all know, a center cannot be within the system and govern it simultaneously.

On the other hand, the wavelength of each potential self is determined by its distance from the fulcrum-crone. But if we understand any of an infinite series of women and ur-women to be fulcra, the wavelength of each self is also infinite, both infinitely short and infinitely long, infinitely red and infinitely blue. Instinctively, these selves seek each other out and merge, unable to comprehend the depravity of their conviction that a single woman can serve as a hinge around which they all turn. The resulting sea of constantly merging and disengaging selves resembles the primordial mitosis-swamp—the infinite female, treading water in a mass of pure, white light.