My reading corner

 

My book family is an extended one, and ever-growing! I am always ready to adopt superior novelists; Jorge Amado (The War of the Saints) and Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Yangsze Choo (The Ghost Bride) and Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being) are most welcome. There’s always room at my table for magical realists and masters of spy fiction and policiers; when I find we get on well together, I devour everything they have written at high speed, as I’ve done recently with Mick Herron and Matt Haig.
     This applies to writers in all genres. I have recently been on a Roberto Calasso binge, savoring everything from Ka and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and La folie Baudelaire to Tieoplo Pink, Ardor and the (unfortunately disappointing) The Tablet of Destiny. Calasso's The Celestial Hunter is my favorite. Who can resist a book steeped in Ovid's metapmorphoses that opens with this?

In the time of the Great Raven even the invisible was visible. And it continually transformed itself. Animals, at that time, were not necessarily animals. They might happen to be animals, but sometimes they were humans, gods, lords of a species, demons, ancestors. And humans weren’t necessarily humans but could also be the transient form of something else. There were no tricks for recognizing those that appeared. They had to be already known, as one knows a friend or an adversary. Everything, from spiders to the dead, occurred within a single flow of forms. It was the realm of metamorphosis.

     Some members of my book family hold court for a time, then retire into a quiet space. In the late 1980s, when my dreams led me into the world of the Iroquois in an earlier time, my intimate clan, over many months, included the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations, an extraordinary collection of the reports of blackrobe missionaries in New France and New York in the seventeenth century. Since a house move they are in storage but I know they are plotting to get back in my line of sight.
     I am a lazy linguist, but I like it when members of our book family speak their own languages because (as the Emperor Charles V said) to know another language is to live a second life. I am currently reading the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys' book on his pioneering experiments in lucid dreaming in his original language; I read Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger (1867) previously in a clumsy and incomplete translation.
      My current reading includes a quite wonderful book by Lynn Struve on the history of dreaming and dream sharing at the end of the Ming dynasty in China, an age of anxiety that was prime time for dream writers. If I were asked - as customs officers used to ask - if this is for business or pleasure, I would say "both, but for pleasure first."     
      Struve writes in The Dreaming Mind and the End of the Ming World: "Does it matter what people of the remote past thought about their dreams? It certainly should matter to those who study intellectual-cultural history, primarily because dream-writing in general brings us closer than any other kind of writing to the subjective consciousness of the highly literate, who collectively set the major trends of their respective civilizations....Dream-writings can indirectly contribute to a history of consciousness, not in the sense of what people were conscious of over time (such as class identity) but in the sense of what people thought consciousness was and how they experienced it." 
     Elders in my book family, often consulted, include William James, C.G.Jung, Emerson, Robert Graves, C.S. Lewis, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Thomas Mann, Henry Corbin. Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess, has a place of honor in our book family, and I often call on Jane Roberts and her multidimensional mentor Seth. Every three or four years I ask Joan Grant to tell me again (in Winged Pharaoh) about how Egypt dreamed, and I sit down again with Viktor Frankl, in a quiet corner, so he can remind me (through Man’s Search for Meaning) of how the imagination can get us through the most hellish conditions. I’ll smoke a cigar with Mark Twain, who reminds me that we must not approach anything serious without bringing a sense of humor, or have nightcap with Graham Greene, who is always good for tips on the writer’s trade and how to turn memories and dreams into plot and character. 
    When the poets speak, we need to isten, especially when the poet is W.B. Yeats, who once declaimed to me, “What better guide/to the Other Side/ than a poet?” I open Rumi or Homer - or whatever book is closest to my hand -for daily bibliomancy. I walk with Baudelaire whispering in my ear that the world is a forest of living symbols that are looking at us. I go back again and again to the Odyssey and to Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

Per tornar altra volta
La dov’ io son

So I may return again
To where I am

 

Many faces of the Guide

The Guide can take many forms, in dreams and on the roads of waking life. Our true spiritual teachers often use shock or humor in their efforts to wake us up to the real nature of things, and they love to play dress-up.
     An earnest woman in a church group once asked me, at the break, whether she could meet her guardian angel in her dreams. "Absolutely", I told her. When I began to explain the process of dream incubation, she interrupted me. "I've done that three times, and each time I asked to meet my guardian angel, I got Garfield the Cat."
     I asked her to explain to a visiting space alien, "Who is Garfield the Cat?" She explained that he's greedy and always looking out for Number One. "Angel means messenger", I pointed out to her. Could there be a message in Garfield's approach to life? This earnest woman, who had clearly given a lot of her life to service to others, thought about this, then stole a quick look at the buffet and asked, with a mischievous glint in her eyes, "Would it be okay to jump the line and get some chocolate cake while it's still left? I reassured her that Garfield, as guardian angel, would say "Absolutely.”
    The angel can be terrifying as well as funny. Rumi evokes beautifully the terror Mary felt when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her in the moment of annunciation. In the presence of a supremely greater power, she literally jumps out of her skin. Whereupon the angel who is patron of the astral realm and of dream travel says to her (in paraphrase): "You flee from me from the seen to the unseen, where I am lord and master? What are you thinking of?"

    The truth of our dealings with higher sources of knowledge - and above all the Guide of our soul - is that we don't need to go looking for them because they are forever looking for us. When Dante at last finds Beatrice (the Guide appearing in the form of a beautiful women he loved and lost) after the terrible journey through all the hells of the medieval imagination, she reproaches him that for many years she was seeking him in dreams, and he would not listen.

    The Australian Aborigines say that the Big stories are hunting the right people to tell them. It's like that with the powers of the deeper world. Here's a poem I wrote about this:

Hunting Power

You say you are hunting your power

But your power is hunting you.
I'll go up to the mountain, you say.
I'll fast and live on seaweed
I'll hang myself on a meat-hook
Under the hot sun. I'll give up sex
And wine and my sense of humor.What are you thinking of?
For you to go hunting your power
Is as smart as the mouse hunting the cat.

Go out in the garden any night
Step one inch outside the tame land
And you are near what you seek.
Open the window of your soul
Any night and your guide may come in.
The issue is whether you'll run away
When you see what it is. To make sure
You succeed, tether yourself like a goat
At the edge of the tiger wood that breathes
Right beside your bed. He'll come.

"Hunting Power" is in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories published by Excelsior Editions (State University of New York Press).

Drawing by RM

Watch what stories you are carrying

I see that I must be more careful about the books I select as my travel companions. This week it felt like a mischief-making tree spirit leaped out of a book onto the train track in front of me.
    On Monday I set off to New York City on Amtrak. This was the first time in ages I had gone to the city by train. It can be a beautiful ride. The line runs along the Hudson River most of the way, and it was a fine day to view the fall foliage and the play of light on the water.
    My attention flitted back and forth between the shifting landscapes through the window and my first literary selection, an excellent collection of cross-cultural studies on the practice of dreaming. among indigenous peoples titled Dream Travelers and edited by Trent University anthropology professor Roger Ivar Lohmann. If you consider a scholarly text safe reading, read on.
    I was soon immersed in Lohmann's account of his own fieldwork among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea. They consider dreams to be real experiences; you make visits and you receive visitations. Dreaming is a field of interaction with beings of various kinds, including the dead,  the fairy-like wobuno, wild nature spirits and witches. "Supernatural encounters are frequent; nevertheless, they are odd and exciting. They are long remembered, the source of many tales around the hearth." *
    In dreams, spirits might provide guidance that would lead to a successful hunt, especially when the hunter made certain offerings. Dreams could also reveal when a malevolent spirit was the source of illness or misfortune. It seems that in this part of the island, tree spirits are especially engaged with humans. Before recent Christianization, an elder told Lohmann, "When a man was sick, people would dream that a tree spirit or other thing had hurt him."
     I was startled by the idea that a tree spirit might attack a human. I read on, in the New Guinea elder's account, "I myself have dreamed when someone was sick that the tree spirits made him or her sick."**

     At this precise moment, less than fifteen minutes into my journey, the Amtrak train came to a shuddering stop. After a long pause, it was announced over the crackling intercom that "a big tree fell across the track." After another pause, a conductor rushed up and down the aisle yelling that the tree was on fire. "There's smoke!" We couldn't see what was going on, but we were next told that the "big tree" had brought down some power lines.
    After a long wait, we were told that the train was going back to Albany-Rensselaer, where we had started. We had to shunt in reverse the whole way, agonizingly slowly. Back at our point of departure, we were left to meditate upon life for a long time before we received word that railroad crews had succeeded in clearing one of the two tracks leading to New York City, but we would now have to wait for an incoming train to come through before we could leave.
    I got to Penn Station nearly four hours late. A ride scheduled to take 2 hours 25 minutes took over six hours. When our train resumed the journey interrupted by the falling tree, I put the anthropology book that did not seem able to contain tree spirits back in my overnight bag.
   I contemplated the demonic cat on the cover of the second book I had brought with me. It is one of my favorite novels, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, in which the Devil comes to Moscow with an amazing entourage. I reread it for pleasure every few years.
    But not today. I recalled that in the opening scene the Devil, traveling as a foreign professor, makes the accurate prediction that a certain person will be beheaded before the end of the day - by a tram. Not a train, but near enough.
    Over a late dinner in Manhattan, I mused with a Russian friend about a recurring pattern in my travels: the stories I am carrying proceed to play out in my experience of the physical world.
    I once  took off from Bucharest with a Romanian fantasy anthology that included Mircea Eliade's story "With the Gypsy Girls". I was drawn deep into Eliade's eerie tale, in which a man is lured into a bizarre alternate reality from which he cannot return. I found by the end of that first flight that I had been drawn into a very strange parallel reality of my own. I wandered lost all night, stranded at Warsaw's Chopin airport among Russians and Ukrainians who lacked Schengen visas and lay sprawled on every surface like the dead on a field of battle. I managed to extricate myself only two days later. I wrote about that here.
     On another plane, I was reading a memoir by one of Churchill's bodyguards when a stranger dressed as Indiana Jones took the seat beside me. When I asked him about his costume, he declared that it was "the real thing." He proceeded to tell me that his clothes were made by "Churchill's former bodyguard" - Peter Botwright, who designed the costumes for the Indiana Jones movies. That was just one element in an amazing episode that seemed custom-made for me by some designing minds just behind the curtain of the world. I tell the whole story in the introduction to The Three "Only" Things.   
   At a newsstand at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport, I once found a new bilingual edition of the folktales of Czech writer Karel Jaromir Erben. This became my reading on the first leg of a very long trip home from Europe that ended in a weird limbo of late-night train stations that were not part of my itinerary. My journey took on the coloration of Erben's dark, compelling verse fantasies in which (for example) a woman leaves her husband's bed every night to lie with the dead. You can find that story here.   
    There was the time I was reading A Story Waiting to Pierce You (Peter Kingsley's book on Tibetan-Mongolian shamanism) and got, for my neighbor on another plane....a dominatrix wearing a top hat and Death's heads on the backs of her gloves. The full story is in Sidewalk Oracles
    Back to my latest story. Late Monday night, after walking uptown from Penn Station and checking into my hotel, I was sitting with my Russian friend in El Mitote, a lively Mexican restaurant on the upper West Side. I sipped a margarita and quoted Borges: "The mind is dreaming. The world is its dream."
    "Good thing you did not spend too much time today with The Master and Margarita today," my friend observed. "Strange things are known to happen when people get involved with that book."

    In the Mexican restaurant, the Dia de los Muertos had come early. Skeletons in flouncy skirts and tight jackets were dancing on the wall.
    In the light of the morning, I found Dante standing in a little triangle of green between my hotel and Lincoln Center. Of course. Story within story, all unfolding within the great Commedia. At the television network where I recorded a show, I was greeted by a young woman named Angel. Things seemed to be looking up.
    Memo to self: when you travel, check what themes and plots you are carrying with you.

*Roger Ivar Lohmann, "Supernatural Encounters of the Asabano in Two Traditions and Three States of Consciousness" in Lohmann (ed) Dream Travelers: Sleep Experiences and Culture in the Western Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 191.
** ibid, 193.

Beatrice complains that Dante would not listen to his dreams

Dante has gone through all the cycles of hell. He has mounted the three dread steps to the Gate of Purgatory - the mirror step, which compels him to look at himself in all facets as he truly is; the black step cracked from side to side, that requires him to examine the darkness in his soul; the blood-red step that requites him to explore the meaning of sacrifice and choose the offering he will make.
    He has found that he can only pass the stern Gatekeeper of Purgatory, throned on a great rock hard and bright as diamond, by knocking on his heart.
    He has begun his slow ascent of the mountain of Purgatory.
    And at last he has come to the presence of the one he yearns for, the radiant Guide of his soul. She appears to him in the form of the lovely young woman he loved but could never have. But he sees in her eyes that this being is more than any mortal woman. In her eyes is reflected the terror and beauty of the griffin, the lion-eagle that pulls her chariot, which is accompanied by a host of angels.
    Beatrice addresses Dante by name, the only time the author of the Commedia identifies himself in the text. Then she turns to the angels to make this complaint: 

Ne l’impetrare inspirazion mi valse,

con le quali e in sogno e altrimenti

lo rivocai: si poco a lui ne calse

-      -  Purgatorio canto xxx, lines 133-136

Nor was it any use for me to inspire him,

calling him in dreams and other ways;
he would not heed them! [my free version]

This is a stunning moment. From the heart of Western literature, and of medieval Christendom, we are receiving the message that the Guide of the soul seeks us in dreams. For years before he fell into hell, Dante was dreaming of the Guide, but failed to remember or to heed what he was dreaming. Beatrice's complaint to the angels must resonate in our minds. If we are missing our dreams, we are missing a direct connection to the sacred Guide, the Beloved of the Soul that wishes to be with us everywhere.

Art: William Blake's vision of Beatrice addressing Dante from her griffin-drawn chariot.

Dreaming with Spiritual Guides

In the passage in Dante’s Purgatorio where he encounters his radiant guide in the form of a lovely woman called Beatrice, she reproaches him for not heeding the dreams in which she sought him, over many years. Dante has gone through all the cycles of Hell, and knocked on his own heart, and climbed all the ledges of the mountain of Purgatory, to gain access to the beloved of his soul, who sets fires in his blood.  Beatrice calls angels to bear witness:

Ne l’impetrare inspirazion mi valse,
con le quali e in sogno e altrimenti
lo rivocai: si poco a lui ne calse!

It was no use for me to inspire him,
calling him back through dreams
and in other ways; so little did he heed me

           - Purgatorio canto xxx, lines 133-136 (my free translation)

Dante is seared by the encounter, made to recognize all the years he lost by not awakening to his dreams.   
     The message is clear and enduring: our true spiritual teachers are looking for us, which is why they can always be found. They especially come looking for us in dreams, when we move beyond the self-limiting beliefs and consensual hallucinations of the little everyday mind.

    The guides who come to us in dreams put on masks or costumes adapted to our level of understanding. There is an old Greek saying that “the gods love to travel in disguise”.

    The guide may appear with a familiar face – that of an old friend, or a departed loved one. The sacred guide may appear in a form that has been shaped by our religious upbringing – or in a form that is wildly shocking to conventional beliefs. Genuine teachers often love to shock us awake.

      The guide may appear in dreams as a generic figure, especially in places of transition or in border zones: as the taxi driver, or the customs official, or the train conductor, or the person at the airline check-in desk.

      When the guide drops even the edge of the mask, the initial effect can be terrifying. “Every angel is terrifying,” wrote Rilke, who knew what he was talking about.

     The encounter with the guide may challenge us to brave up, to move decisively beyond the fear and clinging of the little everyday mind, in order to claim our connection with deeper sources of wisdom and true power.

    This is often the case with dream experiences in which we meet a powerful animal. Faced with a bear or a tiger in a vivid dream, our first instinct may be to run for our lives. Yet the bear or the tiger may be hunting us to invite us to claim our own power and our own medicine. How do we do that? By going back into the dreamspace, through the dream reentry technique *to face whatever needs to be faced and to claim our connection with the dream animal (and/or the angel).

   In Native American teachings, we are not fully alive – we are missing a part of our vital soul energy – if we lack a strong and vibrant connection with the animal guardians. Here, also, it is recognized that our truest and most important spiritual allies come looking for us in dreams. The Lakota have many ways of approaching the sacred. But they also recognize that the greatest gift comes when the sacred beings come looking for us. The most revered medicine lodge among the Lakota is the Bear Dreamers Society. It is composed of those who have been visited and called by the Bear in their dreams.

   Dream encounters with the guide – like all powerful dreams – need to be honored. We may want to create a talisman, or personal “power object”, to hold the memory and the energy of the dream. It may sometimes be appropriate to use a stone or crystal for this purpose. In the shamanic dream practice of the Anishnaabe (Ojibwa) the pawaganauk, or dream visitor, is honored in this way. After an encounter with a dream guide, the dreamer finds a stone that will be more than a souvenir; the stone can become a place of rendezvous and continued communication with the dream guide – as the dreamer learns to journey into a chamber that opens inside the stone.

* Dream reentry is a core technique of Active Dreaming, explained in my books Conscious Dreaming and The Three "Only" Things. I have recorded a CD of shamanic drumming, Wings for the Journey, specially designed for dream travelers who want to develop this practice.

Art: William Blake's vision of Beatrice addressing Dante. As in the Purgatorio, she arrives in a chariot drawn by a griffin, with fierce and beautiful companions. 

Shelf elves, dream detectives and Dante

I am determined to hold on to my copy of Dante. This is a paperback edition with a black cover. I want to finish my notes on his description of different orders of reality, and of angels. Numbers are very important here, including the number 12.

I jotted this dream in my journal on Saturday morning, and went back to work on the first chapter of my new book, especially scenes from my life when I was nine and when I was 18 going on 19. Aged nine, I died during surgery in a Melbourne hospital and seemed to live whole life somewhere else before i came back. At 18, I wanted to die because I had lost the first woman I loved; instead of dying that night, I wrote a poem.
    I paused in my writing and reflection and posted a quick note on my Dante dream on my Facebook page, which I use for punctuation and refreshment in a day or night at my desk. My brief report immediately had a score of dream detectives working on my Dante clues. One of them found a reference to the number twelve early in Dante's poetic memoir La Vita Nuova (The New Life).
    I jumped on this lead. I could not locate a copy of Dante's Vita Nuova in my own library (where the resident shelf elves are known to hide as well as reveal) but the excellent used book shop down the street was open. No, they did not have a copy of La Vita Nuova but it might be in a copy of The Portable Dante that had come in just that morning; it was there on the stand with the New Books, a paperback with a black cover. Yes, it contained the full text of La Vita Nuova.
    Three minutes later (I live dangerously close to this book store) I am at home leafing through the text. The translation is somewhat florid. Ah, this is because it is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I am seized by a personal connection. When I was 18, I played Dante Gabriel Rossetti and read some of his poems in a repertory performance of "An Evening with the Pre-Raphaelites" in Canberra, Australia. I read on. Nine is Dante's number in this unusual memoir, a medley of poetry and prose. He sees Beatrice for the first time when they are both nine years old. He encounters her again when they are both 18 (2x9, as he insists, at length). That is the year when he dreams her death, and then sees her carried to the heavens by angels when she actually dies.
    In La Vita Nuova, we see the first hints of the Divine Comedy that is to come, and begin

to understand how Dante could borrow the form of a lovely woman he could not have (because she was married young and died so young) for the spiritual guide who meets the pilgrim inside the gate of Purgatory when he has come up through all the terrors of the Inferno and opened his heart.
     Dante's "New Life" contains a very interesting account of a dream conversation with an inner guide. The guide appears as a beautiful young men dressed in white but addresses Dante as "my son." Dante makes it clear this experience is unfolding in a sleep dream, in which he recognizes the voice of The Young Man in White from previous dreams. As the poet tries to feel out the nature of their relationship, perhaps asking himself whether the Young Man in White is a projection (though that is not the language of the late 13th century), the inner guide tells him: "I am as the center of a circle, to which all points on the circumference bear an equal relation. With you, it is not so." (ch.XII; my translation).
    I was thrilled with the sense of recognition when I read these words. For me, they are a very exact description of the relationship between our ordinary personalities and a self that is at the center of a family of aspect personalities.
    The Dante of La Vita Nuova is ahead of himself. He not only takes the conventions of courtly love to a higher and more creative level, and helps to birth Italian as a language of literature (in the Tuscan dialect); he demonstrates the central importance of dreaming in the life of the soul and the sources of creativity.
    What is most important for me personally in this adventure in literary synchronicity and memory is that Dante created a new kind of autobiography. His "book of memory", as he called it, is woven from his dreams, visions and poems with just a little connective narrative. He omits personal names and details, making it clear that this is a memoir of his spirit, not his ordinary life. In my current book project, am attempting to do something analogous, untrammeled by traditions of courtly love and medieval religion. 

Dante as I met him at the Marché aux Puces,  St-Ouen de Clignancourt (c) Robert Moss

Why travel

“Ma tu perché vai?”

“Per tornar altra volta la dov’io son.”

“Why are you traveling?”

“So I may return to where I am.”

-          Dante, Purgatorio II 90-92

In my travels around the world, I often find myself thinking of this exchange in Dante’s Purgatorio. Wherever I go, I try to be fully present, to the people, the culture, to the physical landscape and the mythic fundament. I get lost at times, in more than one sense, and that is a special moment of opportunity since in order to find ourselves, we may first need to fall off our maps and our certainties.
     Dante's adventures begin when, at the mid-point of the road of life, he finds he is lost in a dark wood. He must journey through all the cycles of Hell until he at last ascends to the gate of Purgatory and - after knocking on his heart - is at last able to meet the beloved of his soul face to face. The guide takes the form of Beatrice, a beautiful young woman he loved and lost, but in her eyes he sees reflected the beauty and terror of the griffin. The guide is more than human: she is animal, and she is divine.
    What are her first words for the soul traveler? She reproaches him for losing years of time and his soul's direction because he failed to hear her when she called him in dreams, again and again.

Dante and Beatrice (14th century illumination in the Libreria Marciana, Venice)