Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (12 page)

“When I first read your analysis of M's severed head I thought it was exaggerated. But that really did imprint itself on Eeyore, didn't it! I can't imagine how terrified he must have been when he saw it!” When she began in this vein I had expected her to repeat herself drunkenly, but it turned out she was still capable of building an argument: “You wrote that a force controlling the media had recessed the image of M's severed head and blurred its power to provoke. But do you really think that the Japanese view of the cosmos based on the imperial system could have been uprooted and thrown away simply by acknowledging that severed head and debating about it? A view of the universe the Japanese have held for more than twenty-six hundred years? I can't imagine that disappearing any time soon. And if I'm right, then in effect you were expressing your desire that the power of ‘M's severed head’ would reunite the Japanese inside a universe based on the notion of an imperialist system! In effect, you and M were expressing the same desire—I actually tried establishing other sorts of connections between you in an essay I wrote—”

Nonsense! I thought to myself even as I recognized, in a brain that had absorbed a greater quantity of alcohol than Martha's, a certain logic to her argument. It also occurred to me that the weakness of my own essay was responsible for a misunderstanding for which I couldn't blame this American student, but before I could put this into words she continued, her terror written plainly in her face once again: “But what matters most is that the memory of M's severed head is engraved in Eeyore's mind! That's horrible! What are you going to do about erasing that terrifying dream from the mind of a handicapped child? Professor, isn't that more important than contemplating a universe based on the imperial system?”

Each time I think about this, I must acknowledge that Martha was correct. Although she returned to her own country some months ago, her words stick in my craw. Probably, the task ahead of me is more difficult than she imagined. Removing the nightmare that remains like a stain in Eeyore's somehow clouded mind. First, I would have to determine the nightmare's form and whereabouts. We happened to discover the existence of a nightmare about M's severed head propped on the floor. Now Eeyore and I would have to determine together whether it was still alive in his mind in the way that Martha had imagined.

When I wrote just now of the difficulty of locating and removing the nightmare threatening Eeyore I had something specific in mind. I refer to my son's apparent inability to understand what is meant by the word “dream.” More accurately, I have not been able to ascertain whether he dreams but is unable to apply the word “dream” to his experience, or whether he has never dreamed and is therefore thrown into confusion when questioned about his dreams. I have probed this time and again, but it remains unclear.

Nonetheless, the issue Martha raised about Eeyore's nightmare does not disappear. And why shouldn't there be a wound of fear that never manifests in the form of a dream but lodges forever in a dark and indistinct place with no possibility of catharsis? The photograph of a severed head propped on the floor exists, and to Eeyore it appeared to be an individual human being in and of itself. Moreover, from his mother's response to the newspapers and television coverage at the time—I was traveling in India—Eeyore sensed that this must be an important human being and remembered the name M, and these impressions remained locked away without rising to his consciousness.

Yet again, who was to say that dreams had not begun flooding into Eeyore's mind for the first time as he entered adolescence? What sort of tumult might this new experience be provoking? The thought made me want to provide him with a definition of dreams. This had occurred to me before, and I had tried repeatedly in the past to engage him in conversation about it: “Eeyore, do you really not dream? You go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, and sometime in between maybe you're at a concert listening to a piano—hasn't it ever seemed that way? You're asleep, you're sleeping, but you're playing with your sister or talking to your brother—haven't you ever remembered anything like that when you wake up in the morning?”

“
My gosh, that's difficult! I forgot!
”

“It happens but you forget? Or you don't remember because nothing like that ever happened? You take your medicine at night and get into bed and go to sleep, and nothing happens, and when you wake up it's morning and Mama is there to wake you up? Or while you're sleeping you have a feeling you're listening to music, you can even see shapes of the performers, anything like that? Eeyore, that's called having a dream!”

“
Listening to music
—
Mozart wrote a song called ‘Dream Pictures.’ K-five-five-two. Gosh! I haven’ t heard it. I'm sorry!
”

Fruitless as it was, this exchange is an example of my son participating willingly in a conversation about dreams. Where this subject was concerned, this was the rare exception. In the course of my repeated attempts to bring up the subject, Eeyore began sounding his refrain for the most adamant rejection:

“
That's enough. I want to stop now!
”

To my wife, listening in silence at his side, his resoluteness was terrifying. I suppose she feared the day would come when Eeyore would close the channel from his mind to all things in the world, our family foremost among them, with a final “
That's enough! I want to stop now!
”

She never gave voice to her fear, but I suspected she may have read a warning of this outcome in Eeyore's tantrums just before his nineteenth birthday when I was away in Europe.

Thinking back, I recall discussing with my wife while Eeyore was still a child, or more properly an infant—in his case, compared to other children, infancy seemed to extend itself interminably—his apparent inability to dream. This was in direct response to the discovery by the teacher in charge of Eeyore's special learning class, during a three-day and two-night trip to “wilderness school,” that Eeyore didn't know what dreaming meant. Another child in the group woke up crying from a dream. At first, Eeyore listened with interest to the instructor's soothing words, but when the child persisted in crying Eeyore seemed ready to attack him. The instructor felt that his hostility was due to frustration at not understanding what it was to dream. My wife was lamenting what seemed to be the absence of the dream function in Eeyore's conscious and subconscious mental processes, and I tried to console her with the help of a Blake poem.

“There's no need to be so worried because a young child may not dream. A classmate is frightened by his dream and cries, and it seems that Eeyore is unable to understand his distress, but you shouldn't be upset about that! Blake wrote a beautiful poem called ‘A Cradle Song.’ It begins: ‘Sleep sleep beauty bright / Dreaming o'er the joys of night / Sleep sleep: in thy sleep / Little sorrows sit and weep.’ But listen to what happens next: ‘O the cunning wiles that creep / In thy little heart asleep / When thy little heart does wake / Then the dreadful lightnings break.’ In Blake's view, we humans have fallen to earth and therefore all of us, as adults, have ‘cunning wiles'; if Eeyore doesn't have to install them in his heart while he's asleep what could be better than that? In Eeyore's life, cunning wiles are unnecessary. And if he can make it through life without needing them, wouldn't that be wonderful?”

I was speaking as a young husband—it was at least ten years ago—words to a wife who was still close enough to her girlhood to struggle against the pull of brooding thoughts inside her.

“Where can I find that Blake lullaby?” she began asking recently, out of the blue, reminding me of our earlier conversation. But this time I was the one who was fretting about Eeyore's inability to dream and persisted in questioning him about it. Possibly, my wife had recalled the Blake poem I had read to her and asked to see it in print in response to my talk about Eeyore's dream deficiency, not so much to refute me as to lure me back to my earlier way of thinking. And certainly her request had something to do with the rapidly increasing number of books about Blake strewn around the sofa where I lay reading since my return from Europe this spring. This directness about all things was how my wife lived her life. Which meant that she might ask me any day why I had turned away from my earlier thinking and was now insisting that the power to dream was essential to Eeyore. Late one night, sipping the whisky I needed to sleep, I tried rehearsing an answer in advance: “Because I happen to be Eeyore's father, and dreams have a role in my profession. So it's only natural for me to want my son to have at least some capacity to dream!” So far words had worked well enough, albeit in a whisper, but there was an image lodged inside me, of dreams and fathers and sons, that made me feel inadequate to describe it with any fluency or ease. So I fell silent, and caused my mind to go silent, and strained to hear the image as though I were listening to the wind. This was not an image I had created; it had been revealed to me in words that were not my own. “So we gave him the good news of a boy ready to suffer and forbear. Then, when (the son) reached (the age of) following him about here and there [(serious) work with him], he said: ‘O my son! I have beheld a dream in which I offer thee in sacrifice: Now see what is thy view!’ (The son) said: ‘O my father! Do as thou art commanded: Thou will find me, if Allah so wills, one practicing patience and constancy!’ So when they had both submitted their wills (to Allah), and he had laid him on his forehead (for sacrifice), we called out to him, ‘O Abrahim! Thy faithfulness to the dream has been seen! [Thou hast already fulfilled the vision!]’ Thus indeed do we reward those who do right. For this was clearly—a trial. And we redeemed him with a gorgeous sacrifice. And we left (this blessing) for him among generations (to come) in later times.”

I have copied this passage from the Koran, not from Genesis in the Old Testament. One reason is that the internal image I derived from this episode is based on the Iwanami paperback translation of the Koran by Toshihiko Izutsu; another reason may be that in the Koran, but not in Genesis, it is a dream upon which the episode turns. “Thy faithfulness to the dream has been seen.…”

The faithfulness in question is of course Abrahim's to Allah; but to me it represents the faithfulness, through the agency of a dream, of the relationship between Abrahim and his son. “O my son! I have beheld a dream in which I offer thee in sacrifice: Now see what is thy view!” “O my father! Do as thou art commanded: Thou will find me, if Allah so wills, one practicing patience and constancy!”

Calling to mind this glorious dialogue between father and son when I am alone in the middle of the night—buoyed by the power of alcohol—I am confronted by a thought which I can only let pass through me like a storm with my face red and my head bowed, a thought that will circle around me my entire life. For five weeks or so following my son's abnormal birth, I had longed for his death, in other words, to destroy him. My longing was not based on a revelation from Allah appearing in a dream, nor on the agreement of my son. It was merely my egotistical desire to protect a future for myself and my wife, who still knew nothing of her baby's abnormality, a longing of searing urgency like hot coals beneath my feet!

If, during those five weeks, I had found the accomplice I was searching for in the hospital where the baby was lodged, would I not have succeeded unscathed in eliminating my son and in extinguishing his brief memories of life?

But at the end of five weeks I managed to recover—sometimes I feel I can hear a voice whispering to me from just behind my ear that all I really accomplished was resigning myself to not murdering the infant, avoiding punishment under the law and deep depression—and agreed to an operation for my son. Since then, pushing away the calamity that has continued to assail us as a family, we have survived. And my son has made it past his nineteenth birthday. Even so, no powerful detergent has allowed me to wash out of my life those disgraceful five weeks, nor do I expect to succeed at this as long as I live. Based on this feeling I expected that, as my son developed the power of his intelligence step by deliberate step, the day would come, having reached a certain stage, when he would say the following (I imagine that his voice will be soft, as when, at age five or six, able to distinguish as many as one hundred different bird calls, he would murmur, for example, “
kingfisher, red kingfisher
”)
:
“Father, to tell the truth, since I was very small I've been having the same dream. I'm even smaller in my dream, I've just been born, and you're trying hard to find a way to murder me.”

I also thought about Eeyore's dysfunction as it relates to the more positive function of dreams. This was likely to be useful in preparing a reply to my wife when she asked why I had begun only now to lament Eeyore's inability to dream.

I dream. Sometimes my dreams reveal an escape tunnel leading to the brightness beyond the real world which constrains me. My son, constrained even more closely by the real world than I, also dreams. Perhaps his dreams are his escape tunnel; and perhaps, if something like the thin winter sunlight shines down that tunnel, then his tunnel and mine might connect. Down the tunnel of my dream I glimpse my son liberating himself inside his own dream.…

I had an actual dream that illuminated this formulation lucidly from beginning to end. I had just begun devoting my days to reading Blake's Prophecies with the help of David V. Erdman's commentaries. Reading Blake was directly related to my dream. Perhaps I should say my dream was based on my amateurish, distorted reading of Blake.

The world of Blake's mythological poetry teems with demigods who manifest the power and function of the universe, well-known figures such as Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas, and Los. Then there are Ahania, Vala, and Enion, demigods who are also unique to Blake and who may be considered projections of the female principle. Next come the symbolic characters who serve to render manifest the structure of this world as part of the divinely ordered universe, a cast of many characters. Each time I encountered a new name I would underline it, make a note in the margin, and transfer the name to an index card, and in this way I gradually became familiar with Blake's Prophecies. His power to express his symbolism with such aliveness that it seemed empirical was also acting on my brain as I dreamed.