My dream this morning, hard upon waking, is that today is my wedding day. At the top of the stairs that rise from the entry way inside the front door, I see my resplendent bride standing in the difuse sunlight, beside her a hastily selected maid of honor - a friend from work.
I know that I have succeeded. My deception has been complete and she has come all the way to this day not knowing that it is a sham. There will be no guests. Not even what is left of her far flung family will find their way to a chapel door (behind which no sacred space has been reserved) because the ones who might have managed the journey have not heard the call to begine it. The intricate invitations over which we spent so much time in agony and reversals, I had placed by an unsuspecting assistant in the socially responsible recycling bin far away from where they might be seen. There is no aesthetic florist or tasty nourishment scheduled for delivery as promised. No witness will arrive in a flowing robe to sanctify our future.
She trusts me to summon in-the-flesh all the necessary guests and merchants to make this ritual day real and binding to support tomorrow's mystery of our life together and make yesterday's suffering somehow worth the trouble. I show her reassuring evidence of our strangely tollerable growing debt, our first shared reality and initation, marked by reams of receipts and printed acknowledgments generated in the virtual world of my expertise and then cancelled beneath her radar, if not false from the first.
Just before I wake to a tick-tock morning in which there are keyboards with which to transmit this story, I am standing inside the entry door in my heavy creditcard tuxedo with one dewy, perfect question coolly pinned to my mind like a refrigerated boutonierre: will my deception matter? What will she do?
~~~~~~~~~
When the groggy world wakes and goes about its business, the sun brings various kinds of mornings in circles to those already at work in the dark. In that early dark that cannot divorce itself from the day before but can spin a claim on the day to come, in what dream does humanity find itself? What dilemmas present themselves? What questions linger through bathing and eating, for those who can, to accompany hands and feet as they reach step-by-step to create today from yesterday's preparations?
It seems to me that an honerable response to these cultural questions might cover quite a bit of ground, whether concrete or imaginal or "natural" or psychologized or gardened or asphalted or political or mythological or undecided. This journey of exploration seems required because even the simplest bits of life are irreducibly composite: possessed of multilayered interactions, a local gravity generated by the consequences of creative traumas, and morphed by and impacting the world around.
If there are impacts and consequences both dreamed and carried into the waking culture, then dreaming seems to promise coming shocks at several levels, but of what kind and is that certain? It would seem like the bride is being groomed for something. My questions at this end seem to deal with what "matters" and "what will be done?"
My fear upon waking is that there will be no more reaction than a shrug and nothing to do but drift...apart, together, whichever. There were receipts and invitations in evidence weren't there? She loves me, doesn't she, and therefore must forgive and trust that even my ellaborate dramas of misdirection will turn out for the best on some end day? It's no big deal.
The difficulty lies in how much that sucks. Like a vacuumming of flesh from bone today, with a machine plugged in to the end of a story imagined as ending with Disney spells. Like heaving polluted air into lungs working three times as hard because what is poisonous has been industriously welded to and almost cannot be pried away from what is required for life. Like being abandoned to swim in the consequences of broken promises native to a world that measures success by evaded prosecutions and the size of off-shore bank accounts and accumulated influence hidden beneath complexity whitewashed smooth with terrified certitude. Like a list of links, associations, and comparisons which suggest a quantity of supporting information but which may fail over time to congeal as deeper understanding. Like the co-existence of radiant sunlight on bridal gowns just upstairs from syntheticaly shiny, well and professionally dressed, practiced deception.
And this dream and this deception and this world are mine. And yours. Now what?
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