The Ur-Ground of Literature

 

 The raw sexuality of her call to her lover is wild and shocking: “Plow my vulva!” He plunges into her like a “wild bull”. When they couple, he is the green life of all growing things and she is the Queen of Heaven. He is Dumuzi and she is Inanna.

     But she is called to go down into the dark places, and travels a terrifying path of ordeal and initiation. When she returns, transformed, to the surface world, she finds that her man has forgotten her, playing king of all he surveys. Her angry curse sucks the light out of his day. Now Dumuzi dreams that everything turns against him. Trees are uprooted, his hearth fire is doused, his drinking cup is thrown down, his shepherd’s crook is taken away. A fierce raptor seizes a lamb from his sheepfold, and he knows that something fearsome and unforgiving is coming for him.
     Death is coming for him, and his only hope lies in the love and feminine wisdom of his younger sister, Geshtin-anna. She is a reader, “a tablet-knowing scribe”, who knows the meaning of words and of dreams.
    She helps him to hide, but in the end he cannot escape his own demons. He is overpowered by galla demons and carried down to the realm of Inanna’s dark double, the Queen of the Underworld, into his own cycle of death and rebirth.. Grieving, both Inanna and his constant sister will seek him in the lower world, using drumming, like shamans. And they will make a deal by which Geshtin-anna will take her brother’s place in the Underworld for half the year, giving him time up top with the goddess in her sunnier disposition. But that is a later story in the cycle of Inanna.
    The Dream of Dumuzi is the oldest recorded dream. It was written in Sumer nearly five thousand years ago, scored with marks on baked clay that look like the tracks of a very thoughtful sandpiper. Almost certainly, it was written by a woman. We can’t miss the fact that the first dream interpreter on record is a woman who can read and write, the “tablet-knowing scribe.”
    Geshtin-anna becomes the goddess of dream divination (and of wine).

The Dream of Dumuzi, unclothed in its beauty and terror in a modern translation by Diane Wolkstein, is great writing, and takes us where great writers do not fear to go: into the inner chambers of the heart, into the demon-haunted mind, into the mysteries of death and rebirth. Thanks to its survival, we can say without hesitation that one of the first uses of writing – which was invented in Sumer – was to record dreams, and that one of the great things to emerge from recording dreams, at least five thousand years ago, was literature. Writers have always been dreamers. [1]        

Dumuzi was king of Uruk, not far from Ur, the most famous city of the Sumerians and the one from which Abraham set out to found a new people. So Bert States is doubly correct when he says “dreaming is the Ur-form of all fiction.” [2]
    States suggests that storytelling springs from the same “skill” that allows us to produce dream narrativesand compares the mental state of the creative writer to that of a lucid dreamer: “Just as the lucid dreamer is slightly awake, slightly outside the dream, while being largely inside it, so the waking author is slightly asleep, or slightly inside the fiction while being largely outside it.” [3] Many fiction writers (including me) would attest to the accuracy of this description. It probably applies to creative minds from many fields operating in a flow state of relaxed attention or attentive relaxation. In this state, as Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust, the writer may also be, for the moment, “an extratemporal being” [4] 
    Dreams provided both energy and inspiration for literary creation. As a boy, Aeschylus (born 525 BCE) was sent to watch over ripening grapes in a vineyard. When he dozed off, Dionysus, god of wine and drama, appeared to him and gave him instructions for a new kind of theatre. Prior to this, ancient Greek drama was rather static ritual, with a single actor on stage, and a chorus that did not interact directly with him. Aeschylus was inspired in his dream to introduce a second actor; this was the birth of Western theatre. He went on to write ninety plays, although only seven are extant.

“Poetry is always the result of flooding”, a young poet told Stefania Pandolfo as she journeyed among rural Moroccan villagers for whom dreaming and poetry are vitally important, and always interweaving. A real poem bursts from an emotion that is inundating, overwhelming – until it finds creative release. [5] 
   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. He recounted the dream to his mother and she told him that he had become a poet. This became his life’s calling.[6]
     From the priestess-scribe who wrote Dumuzi’s story to the latest novels by Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, dreams have provided wonderful material for stories and novels, scripts and poems. The dream may provide the rough first sketch of a theme or a plot or a character, with everything still to be worked out and delivered – perhaps with the help of subsequent dreams – over a considerable period of time. The dream may have the structure and detail required for a finished story or poem (but is unlikely to be “finished” in the sense that it will be truly good writing until the raw report has been shaped and polished). The dream may be inserted in a narrative and attributed to one of the characters as Graham Greene did for Querry in A Burnt-Out Case). The dream may be delivered as a story without a frame, as Franz Kafka delivered a nightmare in Metamorphosis while insisting, in the tale, that the man turned into a giant bug was not dreaming.
   The literary dream has been used as a plot device in many ways. It may be used to take the reader into the inner life of a character. It may be used to set up critical narrative tension, for example between a character’s desires and his conscience, a central theme in Dostoyevsky’s use of dreams.
    The dream can be used as an architectural device, to open and frame a story that may be anything but a dream; the medieval Roman de la Rose is a classical example, from an age when dreams were greatly respected. In the classic Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber novel opens with a goddess creating a mountain from 36,501 pieces of stone, one of which - rejected - is a speaking rock whose complaint is heard by two immortals and is gifted with a very mobile life, in different forms, in the mortal world – known to gods and immortals as the Red Dust - and elsewhere.[7]

     Writing and dreaming are closely related in daily practice. Writers who keep journals and record their dreams are giving themselves a warm-up, flexing the creative muscles that will work on the larger project. Writers who may not record their dreams with any regularity nonetheless rise from sleep with their heads full of words – as Dickens related in his letter to Dr. Stone – that are pressing to come out. [8]

A writer’s dream may help to “break up the great fountains of the deep” (a phrase Mark Twain used repeatedly) releasing the power of long-buried memories, or bringing through ideas that have been growing in the preconscious or the deeper unconscious for years or decade. That is how Aslan came to C.S. Lewis, giving him the key to Narnia. As “Jack” Lewis recalled 

The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my head since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’
    At first I had little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams about lions about that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him. [9]] 

     Finally, it is in dreams and flow states that writers come into contact with inner helpers. Robert Louis Stevenson communed with his “Brownies” in states of reverie, and gave them the credit for doing better than half his literary work. Yeats spoke of the “mingling of minds” that can bring assistance, in a creative venture, from intelligences that seem to belong to other times or other dimensions. Milton described the source of his inspiration as   

....my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated prose [] 

Milton spoke of “being milked” after his nights of inspiration, as – totally blind by the time he composed his most famous work – he dictated to a scribe.

 

Notes and References

 1. This translation of the Dream of Dumuzi is in Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, 1983, pp 74-84.     Dumuzi (later called Tammuz) is a Mystery god who dies and is reborn, and the cycle of his ever-recurring death and resurrection is also the cycle of the crops in what is now southern Iraq. He dies in the spring at the time Iraqi farmers, in their hot country, harvest their wheat and barley; he is resurrected when they put seeds in the earth. In the Christian calendar, this is Easter time. The Shia ritual mourning for the martyred Imam Hussein at the site of the battle of Karbala – a rite Saddam tried to suppress – takes place at the same time. Life rhymes, and so do the life cycles of gods. See  E.W.Fernea, Guests of the Sheikh. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.

2. Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.1993, p.3. 

3.  Bert O. States, Bert O., “Authorship in Dreams and Fictions” in Dreaming vol.4 no.4 (December, 1994) pp. 239-240

4. Samuel Beckett, Proust. New York: Grove, 1931, p. 56)

5.Stefania Pandolfo,  Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p.259]

6. ibid p. 265

7. Tsao Hsueh-chin, Dream of the Red Chamber (1754). Trans. and adapted by Chichen Wang. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

8. Charles Dickens letter to Dr Stone. February 2, 1851; see Warrington Winters, “Dickens and the Psychology of Dreams” in PMLA vol.63 no.3 (September 1948) pp. 984-1006.

9. Lewis, C.S., “It All Began with a Picture”, Junior Radio Times, vol. 68 (July 15, 1960) reprinted in Of Other Worlds. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975, p. 42.

10. Paradise Lost IX. 21-4

Text adapted from The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

 

 

 

Flooding, or The Making of a Poet

It is said of a people who live east of Fez that they value poetry above all other human activities. There was a man among them who despised poetry. He said it was for the weak and for women. Bashir was a warrior and a hunter, sudden and violent in his moods, given to strong drink. 

One night he was caught by a dream. The moon threw down a lasso of light. It pulled him down, spilling his wine, extinguishing the lamps. He fell into blackness that became the sound of rushing water, more water than the village had ever seen. When his sight cleared he saw that the little river where the women washed clothes had become a great torrent, waves rising mountain high. The sky sheeted heavy rain. There was no horizon except endless water. 

In the savage flood, he saw trees and houses, donkeys and camels, carried away, and a woman he might have loved and a man to whom he owed money and the witch who sold him a charm against the evil eye after setting the curse on him, and a fat grafter whose neck he had broken though the thief had been buried for three years. He wept when he heard the howls of the sight dog who had hunted with him. Then the flood took him too. He had nothing to hold onto, nowhere to stand. This was the end of the world. His life memories swirled in his head like water going down a drain. 

He was thrown up by an immense wave, and hurled down with bone-shaking force. He tasted sand and rust. He opened his eyes. He smelled coffee and warm bread. His woman was making him breakfast. He brushed this aside, more gently than he might have done on another day. This gave her the courage to ask if he was well. She did not say that the noises he was making in the night were not human, or even bestial. 

He told her he was going to see Shaykh Omar. He must go at once. He paused only to put on a clean garment and his sandals. Omar the Blind, they called him, not because he had cataracts but because he saw with inner vision. He lived in a house no better and no worse than most in the village, under a date tree. He was famous for his beautiful ghazals, lyrical poems of erotic encounters between the soul and its beloved. He was the judge of the poetry contests that were more popular here than football. 

"I've been waiting for you," the shaykh told Bashir. 

"I dreamed of a flood. It took the whole land. It was the end of the world. Does it mean I am going to die?" 

"You have died already, my son. Welcome to paradise." 

Bashir gaped, then looked carefully around. The landscape was surely the same as yesterday, and the smells, and the hot dry wind gusting from the south. Yet there was a subtle shimmer to things, as if nothing was quite fixed or tethered to the earth. The wind carried the sound of stringed instruments. With the music came birdsong that became words. The words shook their wings inside him, then took flight from his lips. 

"You broke the vessel and I became wine." 

Bashir sat open-mouthed, shocked at what he had released. 

Omar the blind sipped his glass of red tea and made a sound like a kiss with his wet mouth. "My friend, everything will be different. You have been made a poet. It is known that all poetry comes from flooding."

Art: Claude Monet, "Flood Waters" (1896)