Oh, my, this seems a doubling of the Ragnarök dream!
Author: ralockhart
Things Seen in a Dream Scene…poem in response by Russ
Things Seen in a Dream SceneClustered they were—here and there
Yes, remnants of humans remained
Living on mountains of human remains
No one knows what lies beneath
The alluvial deserting and swamping
The constant rain washes everything
Thirst is quenched but hunger is not
So very hot the wet rises steaming
But the birds do not notice, they are flying
While all the animals follow them northward
Humans not following, they’ve forgotten how
No children are seen, no babies' cries are heard
There is talk of what might have been, what could be
Forgotten now that humans were gatherers and hunters
Not remembering humans are animals, are mammals
Not remembering anything useful now, not even dreams
“The Gateway,” a poem in response from Estela Bourque
The Gateway
Fictive Response from Mike Daniel
Bumbles Crosses the Line
Bumbles felt himself calm down a bit after his beer bath courtesy of CedrosCM. Jinney’s ministrations didn’t hurt either. A few hours of celebration later he got up. “I’m going to call it a night blokes” he yelled as he stumbled towards the pub’s front door. “I’ll see’s you later, ta”. Bumbles made it to the door, opened it and froze. It was like something strange had passed through his body. He couldn’t tell if it was the beer, his supper of Buffalo chicken wings or a ghost. Maybe it was the cold night air he thought self soothingly. Confused by this conundrum, pondering “what” as deeply as he could, he began to step over the cill. This being an old English pub the cill had energy unto itself. It was if the cill reached up and gleefully tripped him. He tried to grab the door handle but it swung with him. With his immense girth underway a gentle recovery was not in the cards. Bumbles fell sideways in a gentle unrelenting pirouette landing face down in a thicket of brambles growing on the sidewall of the pub.
“Ow, shite. I’m going to kill you, you damn bushes” he screamed. The brambles were unperturbed. Thrashing in his attempts to free himself only made his pain worse so he stopped. Facedown in the thicket Bumbles realized he had well and truly bumbled this time. Any attempt to lift his head caused the thorns hooked in the skin of his face to cut deeper. “My face, it’s on fire” he sobbed. “I’m going to die, bled to death by a bush”. Pull yourself together Garth (his true name) came the voice of his mother. Lying still he began to sort out a plan to get free, to LIVE. Wriggling his arms he found they were only lightly hooked. Moving eel like, he broke free of the thorns, slowly moving his hands up to his face. Feeling around with his fingers Bumbles was able to unhook his skin from the crown of thorns ringing his face.
Lifting his head away from the thorns Bumbles noticed an odd disc like thing mixed in with the dirt and blood. Wrenching free he hauled his bulk up grabbing a handful of dirt and hopefully the disc with his left hand. Finally released from his thorny prison he staggered to his feet only to hear Jinney say “Bumbles what an arse, you’ve destroyed my dessert bush”. Bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations he didn’t have the energy to bellow some profanity at her. Shaking his head Garth staggered down the street toward home, #10 Drowning Street. A block down the street he remembered the odd object he had tried to grab. Looking down he opened his hand. Mixed in with the dirt and clotted blood was an oddly shaped cobalt blue disc. Stuffing it all in his pocket he began to whistle. “Things might be looking up”, he thought. Little did he know…
Poetic Response from Tony Albino
BAKERSFIELD
He sat on the edge of the bed
waiting patiently for his memory to return.
He knew he’d find it again,
like the left shoe to
his dress-up brown wing-tips
that he liked to keep polished
more than any other pair.
The shoe turned up again,
didn’t it?
Why not his memory?
He looked at his bandaged finger.
Someone said he caught
it in the toaster
trying to fish out his burnt bread.
He didn’t remember having a toaster.
Looking at a photograph of someone
whom he thought he must know,
he had to admit he didn’t.
'I am not sure I ever met that person.
I don’t think I would associate with someone who looked like that.’
Maybe he left his memory in the penny jar:
‘A penny for your thoughts’, he thought.
‘I’ve a penny, but no thoughts.
What are they worth if I can’t remember them?
Now let’s see, I’ve my nice,
polished brown wing-tip shoes on,
but where was I going?’
He sat back down on the bed
to think it over.
He looked down at this shoes and asked them:
‘Do you know where we were going?’
I like my brown wing-tips, he thought,
and don’t want to get them scuffed.
I will take them off.
Maybe they will find their way without me.
But if I don’t know where I was going,
how do they know where they were going?
He untied his shoes and turned them over
so as to keep the soles clean.
He couldn’t help noticing the precise stitching of the rubber soles.
Looking closer at the embossed lettering
He slowly pronounced the word he saw: Bakersfield.
He drew a blank; ‘Never heard of Bakersfield.
Don’t remember being in Bakersfield.’
He looked down at his shoes and asked:
‘Do you remember being in Bakersfield?’
He wondered if Bakersfield was where bakers baked in a field.
Dozens of ovens lined up puffing out smoke
and sweet smelling plumes of sugar and cinnamon.
He realized he was hungry but could not remember
when he ate last.
‘What is wrong with me?
I need to lie down and dream.
I remember my dreams all right
But nothing when I am awake.’
That seemed, to him, very odd.
Should be the other way around, he thought.
Unless, of course, he was not the dreamer
but the dream.
So, of course, then he would remember the dream
since that was his true reality,
while the man with the two brown shoes
was caught in some nexus between waking and sleeping,
and thus quite a fragmentary and forgetful figure.
Unable to decide the matter, he quickly fell asleep
and in his dream, he remembered everything
he knew he had forgotten,
Including his misplaced memory.
It was right there all along.
Right there next to his pair of black shoes,
the ones he bought before the brown ones.
Come to think of it, he remembered, he didn’t buy them at all,
He won them in a lottery, a lottery with a catchy slogan:
IF YOU WIN, YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE;
IF YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE, YOU CAN WIN.
Now he was confused.
Did I change the future before or after I won the shoes?
Then he remembered what he did do about the future and he smiled.
Upon waking, he looked in the mirror and saw that he was smiling,
but could not remember why.
He looked down at this nicely polished brown shoes
and thought maybe that is why I am smiling.
Dream Response from Merrilee Beckman
Fictive Response from John Woodcock
Fictive responses to F&C and DCL?
Hi all,
I am wondering if Fex & Coo and Deathling Crown Lottery have stimulated any fictive
responses in you, whether in dreams or otherwise? If so, I invite you to send anything
of this nature to me and I will post. Do not hesitate!
Russ
A new poem from Tony: Tully’s Is Going Out of Business
TULLY’S IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
First there was one,
but the one said, let there be two.
Then the two imagined others
and a curious thing happened.
The others started reimagining the two.
And then all hell broke loose.
There were books and banks
and rings and things.
There were birds of the night
and birds that could pluck a fish
swimming fast and alone in its murky canyon.
There were dreams and visions
and people erased with the touch of a key.
One minute they were here and then they were not,
only to reappear to ask, ‘Where did I go?’
There was confusion and mystery,
There was then and there was now,
the two sliding over each other
as easily as water in a glass.
There was the incandescent smell of flowers,
of jasmine and heather,
and a fox named Agatha.
The audience, caught in the vortex
of time and impaled on its unmoored imagination,
could bear no more and promptly fainted.
Everyone now had a time problem
and did not know when they were to be
where they were supposed to be.
Everyone now worried about tomorrow,
since no one was sure if being time-stopped
would matter to tomorrow if tomorrow never came.
But they did not worry about dreams and bones
and the future since the future could be changed,
unlike tomorrow which was just an invention of the mind.
Just an silly trick to keep us from side-stepping
the whole slavish obsession with what comes next.
But what comes next did not matter
because no one knew what could possibly come next.
All these birds and flowers
and troupes of players
armed with kisses and bullets,
razor tongues and opaque ears,
flew from the moment
towards the past or the future
and upon arriving there
did not not know where they were.
They only thing they actually knew
was that none of the innocent were injured
and everyone else won the lottery
but could not collect until on their deathbed.
Then Tully’s announced it was, sadly, going out of business.
The audience fainted once again
and for the last time.
How shall we think about Next?
It is natural to think of sequence, what follows what. Or, being called, when standing in a queue, "Next!" So, we might ask, what follows Fex & Coo. What is next in line? Simple notions to be sure. But thinking this way would not be accurate. Yes, we have posted the ten original installments of Fex & Coo, and there will follow, in the traditional sense of next—what is made available to the blog members.
But things are more complicated than this.
Fex & Coo began in Tully's Coffee shop on October 10, 2010. Just over seven months later, on April 12, 2011, I had a dream. The dream was very explicit and clear: there was a title, a subtitle, and the first paragraphs of what was the beginning of an unusual narrative. The title was The Deathling Crown Lottery. The sub-title was, “A Cautionary Dream Tale.” I wrote out the text as best I could remember it from the dream. Here is what I sent to Paco a couple of days later:
The Deathling Crown Lottery
A Cautionary Dream Tale
Arthur Compton, 63, died peacefully in his sleep. This was usually the end of it, but not this time. His death was one of the jackpot prizes in the Deathling Crown Lottery.
The winning ticket in the narrative section was purchased by CedrosCM, a frequent player, and one who dreamed often of winning the chance to narrate a life back into existence. Most of his ongoing narratives remained just that: dreams that floated perpetually in his head, never finding their way to the written page, often involving females he imagined narrating to his pleasure.
That would change now, of course.
He knew the rules held no restrictions whatever on the narrative text. Whatever he wrote would come about in the new life of Mr. Arthur Compton, soon to be among the living. Whether he remained as CEO of Reticular Medicinals, Inc., was now completely up to CedrosCM. There in fact was only one rule: the winner must write a minimum 100-word narrative addition each day, weekends and holidays included. No exceptions were permitted. The penalty for failure was spelled out as well. The winner would himself become a prize in the Deathling Crown Lottery.
As with Fex & Coo, Paco sent back a continuation, and once again we became fully engaged in writing in a back-and-forth manner. We were writing both narratives at the same time. So, The Deathling Crown Lottery was not next in the sense that it followed the completion of Fex & Coo. A more accurate image would be something like parallel lines, that sense of "next to each other" from Old High German nahisto, meaning “neighbor,” or the Anglian (nesta) meaning “closest in kinship.” “Next door neighbor” is an English expression that captures this sense.
We were writing these two narratives as two different projects but being fictions and both intimately emerging from the imagination of the authors, they became in various overt, subtle as well as hidden ways, intertwined. This became more obvious and direct as the writing went on. You can see that the final episode of Fex & Coo describes Owl Man as having the above dream and that he is on his way to London, the setting for The Deathling Crown Lottery.
Perhaps a more accurate image of the relation of these two narratives would be the double-helix, stranded form of DNA, with all sorts of connections between the strands eventually giving rise to manifested life forms. One can certainly conjecture that there is something similar going on in the psyche’s DNA.
I will begin shortly to post installments of The Deathling Crown Lottery. This will be followed by various pieces and ending with Caleigh of Dreams. “Caleigh” is a Gaelic word referring to a Scottish party full of spontaneous poetry, music, dancing, and, in this case, attacks on the Queen.
Where we go from there is unknown at the present time.
Russ
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