Stefania Pandolfo’s beautiful but difficult Impasse
of the Angels evokes the landscapes – imaginal more than physical – of
rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important,
and always interweaving.
“Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a younger poet tells
her. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming –
until it finds creative release.
The most respected poet in the area, one Sheikh Mohammed,
was alien to poetry until he dreamed of a flood. The dream came at a time of
personal trauma when he was close to despair. Previously a violent man of
action, he had managed to blow off his right hand in a gun accident.
He dreamed the river was coming down in flood, its front
like a mountain, carrying everything it encountered in its path, trees and
carrion and debris. Instead of fleeing, he stood there in the dry riverbed,
watching and waiting. Then he opened his mouth and swallowed the flood and
everything borne along by it.
Upon waking he recounted the dream to his mother: "The
river in flood entered my mouth and I swallowed it." She told him that he
had become a poet. He who had never recited a verse or cared for poetry, he who
had even ridiculed poets in his previous life, began to ‘speak’, to utter
poetical ‘words.” [1]
I am reminded of the counsel Anais Nin gave to a
seventeen-year-old aspiring writer: “Creation comes from an overflow, so you
have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of
fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you
into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow
for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something
is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great
loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”[2]
I am reminded of my own big dream of a flood,
one of those that dream classifiers might call a watershed dream. I dreamed I
was walking a deer I called Bear as I might walk my dog in the park. We came to
an open plain with a view to a distant horizon. The earth was reddish and
looked bare. I glanced to my right and saw a tremendous wall of water rushing
towards where we stood. Instead of fleeing, I prepared myself to catch the wave
and ride it. I woke charged with creative energy.
Of course, I wanted to go back inside the dream, to enter its
mysteries and to see what would happen if I managed to ride the great wave. I
managed to do this in an operation I call dream reentry, in which we use a dream
or personal image that has energy as the portal for a conscious journey, which
may be field and focused by shamanic drumming. I did not need drumming to go
back inside this dream; it was calling me.
My animal companion was not mysterious.
I have long been closely connected both to the deer and the bear as shamanic allies.
I was amused that in the dream I called the deer Baer, but this, for me, simply
brought into focus the healing aspects of the connection and was not a [particular
focus for the lucid dream journey I was going to make. I wanted to catch the
great wave.
I lay back in an easy chair, closed my eyes, and willed
myself back inside the dream. I found myself in ancient Egypt, in Egyptian garb.
I was surveying the Nile at the time of the inundation, when the great river rose to feed
the thirsty earth, bringing the crops. As the waters spilled, I saw papyrus
plants in great abundance bursting from the earth, which was now black and
loamy. I felt deep in my body that I was being invited to enter a fresh period
of abounding creative energy. This proved to be the case. A new book, new
poems, new projects poured from me and through me. Life was poetry even when I
was writing in prose. Poetry comes from flooding.
1. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.265]
2. Anais Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin. Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (New York: Mariner Books 1972)
