Dear Bazzers

Image courtesy of Sebastian Moronell.

Chola,

I have been having some long-forgotten dreams, now that I have returned home. It is not so much that these dreams were once there, were lost, and now have returned; rather, their subjects were meant to be cast aside – if possible, eternally – from my consciousness. And now they return, haunting me. I put it down to the dry, winter air: it plays tricks on my mind, sending innumerable dust particles up my nostrils like an intravenous injection straight to the brain. There is something haunting about home; it is destiny that works upon me whilst I sleep. 

Dreams are never in our control, and perhaps that’s what scares us most about them. Throughout history folks have drawn different meanings from dreams, some suggesting that God speaks to us through them, others that we are mad men because of them. It is that one area of our lives that can never be fully rationalised, always escaping meaning in its fullest sense. Freud’s big idea was that we don’t really know ourselves, that we have a subconscious that structures our everyday experiences; dreams are the Leviathans of that subconscious.

I was reading Franz Kafka’s Investigations of a Dog when you sent your mail and found a certain passage illuminating with regards to Rookie. In describing the hesitation he meets amongst his fellow dogs, because of his controversial investigations into the source of their food, the unnamed dog-narrator of the short story likens hesitation to forgetting dreams: “It [hesitation] is the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times; and who can damn merely for forgetting for the thousandth time?” I do not wish to pass judgement on your hesitation, only to remark that your hesitation towards this creature — like my many — sounds like a bad dream forgotten, the swelling oceans of the subconscious barely containing the Leviathan within. 

Yours,

Sebastian. 

*

Bazzers,

It's criminal how long it's taken me to get round to this, even though — of course — we together occupy many different streams of conversation :).

It's funny you bring up dreams, in relation to where you're at now, the dog, and of course this moment we keep trying to encapsulate somehow ... I have been asking myself, and actually asked you recently, about when it's time to admit the futility of one's dreams. I don't know if this is a more or less practical question than the slightly cosmic one you pose, of unexplored possibilities, and whether they lead to divergent dimensions; but the symbolism feels loud as hell just now.

Life as an author of somewhat readable, I suppose largely mediocre literary fiction has always excelled at showing one glimpses of the man one could have been — what streets you could have haunted, what man you could have become, what people you might have loved. I have reached a fork in the road — do I continue to grasp at it all, now that I have the wisdom and the experience to be closer than I've ever been, or do I simply use the wisdom and experience to try and not land on my ass? To make the necessary preparations to lead a 'normal' rest-of-my-life, and eventually die quietly?

What's that line I heard in (I think) The Sopranos yesterday? "My old man used to say, Don't get old."

I worry that you, like me, have too much solitude on your hands. You should be investigating as many of those impulses as you can, making worse decisions, and maybe not reading Kafka :). Do you not worry, my pal, that one day you'll be 35 (ahem), and have spent oodles of your youth thinking, thinking, always thinking, and never quite leaping enough to laugh at all the failures and stupidities? It's a silly question, mired in cliche; but sometimes I wonder what if I'd just gone ahead and waved the white flag society seems eager to hand out at every opportunity, every bar, every kiosk. We have too much empathy to not ask difficult questions of the world we live in — but I have always envied the distractions afforded to other men. A partner, usually, that wants them to call more; a father that keeps forcing the family business upon them; a football team that merely ‘chooses’ to not spend a hundred million more.

I wonder what that's like. To be just slightly more than ethereal.

CC.

*

Chola,

It is a peculiarity of this age that we can speak across many passages but rarely speak to each other.

In the past, long silences were filled with either expectation or forgetfulness; now they are filled with a strange mute diffidence to each other. I’d normally associate a certain tragedy to this situation, but I’m weary of being too sentimental. (There’s melodrama to every acknowledgement of how far we’ve come from ourselves).

I’ve always remarked, secretly, on the double meaning of ‘dream’: both as something that occupies our sleep at night, and as our hopes for the future. Who’d be so cruel to merge these two together? It must have, at one point, made sense: our hopes for the future as fantastic or dreaded as our night-dreams; but now it better resembles a pair of conjoined twins who have grown to hate each other. I am not yet of the age yet where I think of my hopes in the present-tense, but I do know that resignation is on the horizon, the day when I have to choose — because, as you write, it is a choice — between the man I could have been and the man I am. It is strange that sometimes I catch myself speaking of my future in the past tense. Perhaps that too is a result of solitude: I often don’t remember which way the world is turning.

Instead of solitude, however, my thoughts continue to turn to the question of consolation: what does it mean to console? This, as you can imagine, has been brought about by our conversations, where a mutual consolation often takes place: I chide you for being too world-weary, and you convince me of the possibilities of life. But the limits of consolation are often quite clear — after a while it fails to allay our fears, or our material condition. I know we don’t often talk politics; but it is the limits of consolation that have guided my feelings towards the election of Mr. Hichilema and the ousting of Mr. Lungu in Zambia. Is this meant as consolation for the political and moral theft that has taken place over the past decade? Are we, forgetful of history, supposed to embrace the new leader with open, hopeful arms?

Pardon my cynicism, but I’d rather be wrong than a fool.  

Yours,

Sebastian. 

***

Bazzers is here: https://www.archivejam.org/