Down the darker and darker stairs
We were in Philadelphia—that is to say, in some unfamiliar city, but not one that was extremely foreign.
While traveling this week, I am reposting another old one—first conceived as an entry in ’s dream journal series, “Strange News from Another Star,” for his newsletter, Numb at the Lodge. My thanks to him for his suggestive and apt commentary on it.
We were in Philadelphia—that is to say, in some unfamiliar city, but not one that was extremely foreign.1 (I have been to Philadelphia once, briefly, a long time ago.) So let’s say it was Philadelphia. That’s what it seemed to be, even though we were never outside, never in any place specific to that city. By “we” I mean my wife and me, though I don’t recall seeing her. Rather, I was aware of her, in the same way I was aware of being in Philadelphia. We were on some sort of tour group—or maybe we weren’t part of the group, but were moving through a tourist spot, through which a tour group was moving, and we flowed along with it at the same approximate pace.
This, more than anything else—this perception of distinctness from the group, but not solitude—is probably what gave me the sense that my wife was beside me, or rather slightly behind me. I wasn’t sure of the place we were moving through, whether it was a church or a museum. It was underground. At any rate, I didn’t see any windows, and had the feeling we were underground. The space was well-appointed, immaculate, and bright. It was lit by electric light (probably some sort of track lighting, running along a concealed ledge where the walls met the low vaulted ceiling). This was then reflected by the walls, which were covered in gold leaf.
We were moving through a series of long, low galleries. I had the sense, from having already passed through several of them, that these galleries were set parallel to each other; that as we moved down one we were moving alongside others; that we had entered this gallery from the one beside it, just as we would move from this one to the next, by means of a short connecting corridor at one end, itself with a rounded arch. (Apart from these connecting corridors, the galleries were completely shut off from each other.)
At the moment when I begin the dream, we are turning right—that is, I am, but with my sense of my wife behind me—into the connecting corridor that will lead me, I think, into the next gallery. I am looking at the wall to my right, perhaps drawing the tip of my finger across it, or refraining from doing so. Its gold surface is pasted with photographs and then, superimposed on these and linking them and the background, there are some markings, waves and dotted lines, with patterns sort of like Keith Haring’s, or Australian glyph art. Though they at first seemed to be drawn in pen or marker, these marks appear, in fact, to have been made with some kind of wand that causes subtle glitchings in the surface. In some instances, wings were drawn around the figures in the photographs, turning them into angels. (The glitch-lines, enclosing space on the gold background, gave them golden wings.) Looking at the photographs, I also began to notice a figure recurring in them, a woman with blond hair, and the thought crossed my mind that perhaps this was a church after all, and she was its priest.
When I rounded the corner fully, I was surprised to find myself not in another gallery like the one I’d come out of, but rather in one of slightly larger dimensions—with a higher and more spaciously vaulted ceiling, like the Stabian Baths in Pompeii. At the far end was a kind of altar, though I didn’t get a good look at it. What attracted my eye were, rather, some frescoes on the wall to my right. I recognized two of them as images of the woman I had seen in the photographs in the linking corridor. They were nearly life-size, floating slightly off the ground. In the first image she was wearing a suit of medieval armor. In the second, further down the hall toward the altar, she wore a clerical collar.
In these larger images, I could me get a good view of her face. Despite a certain abstraction in the style, she was a distinct person, though not anyone I knew from previous, waking life. She was possibly in her forties, neither old nor young, with yellow-blond hair flaring out of either side of her head, and with a placid, settled, determined expression that did not prompt or suggest desire or convey anything maternal. The face also contained a certain warmth. It was not unfriendly, not stern; it was a beautiful face; simply absorbed in its own purposes. There was something almost Soviet about her demeanor, that same self-possession one finds in Soviet women, even among those who have fled and rejected such ways.
At this point, a shift happened. I want to say we moved back into the hall from which we had come, but that’s not exactly it. We did not retrace our steps, nor did we make it down to the end of this larger hall where the altar stood. Instead, we were somehow laterally transported—back into the gallery from which we had come, only now it was a different gallery, giving on its far end onto an atrium whose ceiling rose some two stories high, and whose walls were painted a deep, yet airy green.
In this atrium stood a man addressing a small group, some sitting but mostly standing in front of him. This man, too, had distinct features, though in his case I’m afraid to say they have been covered over in my memory by those of the actor who plays the evil terminator in Terminator 2—which should give a sense of his lean, clean, yet also wayward and I want to say “lost” condition. Approaching slowly down the hallway, careful not to let our feet echo too loudly on the now marble floors, we were soon able to make out what we were listening to. This was a memorial service, and the person being commemorated was the woman whose images we had seen lining the walls, and who was indeed the priest of this establishment, whatever it was. She had recently died. But though she herself was religious, the ceremony was not a religious one. It appeared that she had been some kind of teacher, and those gathered here were her students. As I listened to their words of praise for her lofty and free mind, and felt their warmth, my eyes wandered up the tall atrium behind the speaker. High up on the green wall I could see a painted scroll, on which were written some words in Greek. I tried to make them out, but couldn’t. Then I woke up.
It is hard to convey the joy I felt in telling this story to my wife after I woke up: at great length, and drawing out every detail. Why? I think in part I took some of the indomitable spirit of that woman—priest, warrior, teacher—and some of the steady, solid warmth of those honoring her. But more than that, it was the dream itself, the fact of the dream (something I do not usually have, or do not remember), and that I was able to bring it out of me, so rich in space and detail and elaboration, like some luminous jewel I had within and was able to show.
All of this was connected for me, somehow, with our talk of having a child. As if something in me that had previously obstructed such consideration had been lightened, lifted away. As if, now, it would be possible to have a child. It would be ok to.
For further commentary on the oneiric and chthonic properties of this haunting city (and of its cousin, Baltimore), see my essay on Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys for TANK Magazine. A taste:
But if 12 Monkeys might be the best cinematic depiction of the female academic, it is also, I think, the best filmic representation of the researcher tout court. No other movie I know so persuasively shows how our thinking and our lives are woven together, how our curiosities are linked to our deepest rememberings, how our experiences are irritants in us, inciting us to go in search of them, externalising (and thereby failing to recognise) our private pains and fears in the ostensibly objective subjects of our research, only to find ourselves confronted, just when we think we have mastered them, by the return of the repressed – as Dr Railly is, when Cole carjacks her after her book talk at the museum in Baltimore. (Bursting out of the shadows, growling “I have a gun,” he commands her to drive him to Philadelphia – the very city, strangely enough, where this scene was filmed. In this sense too, you could say, he commands her to take him where she already is.)