28 December 2019

I dreamt of a planet with a moon you're forbidden to look at. If you look, a beast comes from a cave and eats you. I dreamt of a planet with an atmosphere too thick for the stars to be visible. I dreamt of a planet so far removed from the stars that there was no light in the sky. I dreamt I was on Earth on a hill looking at the sky, and it filled with purple light and a thousand wheeling stars, and a song filled the sky and I cried watching what was happening.

I dreamt I sat with two men, one I loved and one I wanted to feel envy for my loving. We watched television. There was a parade of horrible animals. They were all to be eaten in a feast. Many of them were as large as dogs or ponies, black, with exoskeletons and feelers and dozens of legs, pincers and stingers, they were decorated with red ribbons and lucky coins, they carried hundreds of golden coins on their backs, there were a few smaller furry animals that rode them, things like a cross between a cat and a monkey, and smaller ugly black things like land-dwelling eels or unshelled scorpions, the smaller animals ate each other as the procession moved along, I watched in disgust and wonder, there were so many gold coins they spilled to the ground, the television showed the things being boiled and roasted, squirming, spitting juice from the black joints of their legs, the dream shifted before I saw them eaten.

Plague and Love

Writing about plague today. Which isn’t anything new, but I’m always finding something else to say. I’m like a child again, dreaming of plagues and natural disasters, storms, fires, catastrophe, more than boys. My feelings towards both intermingle in similarity, dread and longing, knowing I’m unlikely to be touched by the object of my dreams, knowing I probably wouldn’t want to be anyway. I like to dream of love and disaster to prepare myself for either. For what cannot be prepared for. You cannot prepare yourself to be touched by plague. You cannot prepare yourself to be touched by desire. At least one is likely to kill you, at least plague tends to have a logical conclusion. My luck would be to survive a plague, come out on the other side of fever unsure of the why or the what comes next, lost. If plague won’t have me, what will? Maybe that’s why it’s my favorite sign of an apocalypse, since I want something to have faith in, and I can have faith in the body’s ability to fail. Or maybe the Venus side of me tires of Mars, tires of War, and death is too general, and I don’t like hunger. I like something physical, that’s not so much the domain of men, as war is - plague is for anyone, and it becomes an individual thing, something within you, a singular touch, intimate, you are chosen. A coupling, the most significant coupling, the last. But it’s something you can still survive, like a fire or an earthquake, a flood, a tornado. As a child I also dreamt of gangrenous limbs, fearing the little scratches and scrapes on my shins would fester, and I’d have my leg cut off, screaming, unanesthetized. I might bleed to death, or the rot keep rotting upwards, or I might survive, changed. A flood might come, or a tornado, or a fire, and destroy my home, destroy my town, and I might survive, lost, wandering. I could prepare myself by dreaming of it. I could dream of fever and buboes and a black tongue and ragged breath, and it might kill me, or I might wake up alive, still alive. I could dream both dreams, I could die and survive. I don’t know what the options are with love, with desire.