On cold sleepy mornings blood stops flowing in the veins, the eyes can barely see and people lack the strength to take the next step. Nurses, seamstresses, fitters and chauffeurs, barely alive, doze off on the stairs holding onto the banister. At times someone opens their eyes all of a sudden and begins to look around, finding nothing familiar anywhere and amazed at how close it is from the youth of the world to its old age. And they cannot understand where the mistakes of youth have gone to, the outbursts of feeling, the songs. What has become of the new path of life: Could it possibly have turned into this exhausting, steep, lonely, cobweb-strewn path up and down the stairs? Where is the joy of the parents whose infant sat up in the baby carriage for the first time one warm afternoon, now, all these years later, when everything is already known about advancements, promotions, accidents, divorces and funerals?
The work of creation would have remained incomplete had it not been rounded off with a flood. The countercity had long ago burst its dams. Like a stormy sea that in a single instant pours over the laboriously reclaimed polders, it inundated the entire city from its foundations to its rooftops. When did the leaks begin? No one remembers. It may have been in the first minute after construction began. The river that flows through the city, bearing shattered, glittering reflections of soaring bell towers and steep roofs, merges its waves with the stagnant green waters of memory. And both waters, the one and the other, dissolve like a single droplet in the sea in the black waters of oblivion. For the countercity no water is ever too green or too black. That bottomless ocean receives it all unconditionally, always and in any amount, to the last drop.
Some blame everything on the fine palace that stands in the center of the city. They say it is too tall and that its needle made the first scratch on the sky. Yet in the kitchens that can be seen from its highest floors, no one complains any longer. They are deserted, as if they had been emptied by the plague. At times in the night someone will pass through them and briefly turn on a light. Those who once believed that what is pure will be ever purer and later discovered that purity turns into dirt now rebel against the requirement of absolute impermeability. They whisper that nothing is dirty only when nothing is pure. They want to allow everything that for years with the greatest effort was removed beyond the dome of the sky to mingle with the substance of the city. They assert that if the desire for perfection is only abandoned, then permeability will cease forever to threaten us.
Then the upper and lower waters, once separated, will join together again; the upper waters will cease pouring down on roofs while the lower waters will cease washing away foundations. At that time too, calm will come to the great stormy ocean, on whose waves the sailors of brick-built ships fight for their lives and drown and sink to the bottom like stones, not knowing that life cannot be lost. Drowning sailors do not remember which port they were headed for. Relinquishing unrealistic goals, they can give themselves entirely to the waves and know relief. One way or another all of them – including those who have already come to rest on the bottom – will return safely home.
It is said that neither more beautiful dreams nor another easier life will be of any use to us. It may be that all we need is an even greater turmoil of ever more ardent desires, ever more troubling questions and ever more vapid answers, whose random selection like gambling without prizes brings only torment. Yet torment too cannot last forever: It always moves toward breaking point. There is hope that the glare from which the eye loses all ability to distinguish colors and shapes will turn into the banal image of a street corner, a sign above a store, lace curtains in a window: a sight from which nothing transpires. The uproar from which the ear loses all ability to distinguish sounds will be transformed into the mild silence of waking life, the same silence that endures inside stones. The crushing pressure of thoughts that make the head throb with pain will in the end reveal a light, transparent void.
May that void unfold inside every brick and permeate everything in the world: buildings, sun and stars, clouds in the sky, air in the lungs and the lungs themselves. Only then will the palm begin to fit the handle of the tool, the hat fit the head and the rib cage cease to separate the heart from the rest of the world. Then it will be easier to accept the obvious truth that the burden oppressing us weighs nothing at all. The city to which the tree of the world gave birth at the beginning of this story is not real, just like the tree and like us ourselves. But the life of stones, which has no care for the past or the future, existed and will continue to exist: a steadfast endurance free of any name.
This book was designed by David Bullen Design
and printed at The Stinehour Press in Lunenburg, Vermont.
The type is Dante. The paper is 60lb Via Laid.
Dreams and Stones Page 9