“… guard our Augustine through her sufferings and keep her always in the dream. Let her not be overcome. If she must suffer, let her sufferings be brief. Let them be such as she can bear, yet less than that, or let us in our dreams and in our waking life and work, bear them with her. Help us in our loss. Let those who mourn be comforted. Let us not poison our dreams with grief. Let us get on with the dreaming, else this sacrifice will be in vain, and strengthen us to …”
This went on all night until the fire died.
In the morning, when the ashes had cooled, I went into the fire pit. I searched the ashes, sifting them through.
“You will not find anything,” said Salvatore.
“The fire wasn’t that hot,” I said. “The skull, part of her, some part of her is here.”
Salvatore shook his head. “She is not there.”
“Yeah, sure, she’s in dreamland.”
“You do not understand, my kin. She has not died. She has gone to your world. She has been chosen. You know the story. You have written it on the skins.”
“She walked into the fire. I saw her.”
“No, she did not walk into the fire. The fire only helps us to concentrate, only stands for the …” He shrugged as if it were hopeless to try to find words for what he meant. “Before her foot touched the fire she was gone.”
“Why?”
He shrugged again. “To save us. To save all. When kin waver on the brink …”
“What will she do there?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’ll never come back?”
“But of course she comes back.”
“When?”
“Every day. If not every day, often. In our dreams.”
“But I don’t dream!” I yelled at him.
“My poor kin, perhaps you will.”
“If she comes back to you, in your dreams, why do you all mourn so?”
“We mourn for her, for her sufferings, for the suffering she has been chosen to take on herself.”
“What suffering?”
“The suffering of living in your world.”
“Haven’t you any idea what she will do there? Will she be a seer, a prophet, a … this is a bad time for prophets in the world …”
“It is always a bad time.”
“… they lock them up in cages there. Will she be the founder of a religious cult, followed by a bunch of neurotics and laughed at by everyone else? Will she …” I thought of Augustine—black, female, in that world run by men like me. “Sbgai said a great philosopher of that world was one who went back.”
“It is possible. But most often, those who go back live very obscurely, lest they fall into the temptation of talking too much, of fame and admiration, and of belonging to things. The suffering of living in that world is not the worst danger.”
“But if she lives the life of a poor, obscure black woman, what good can she do? If what you say is true, it’s a waste, a terrible waste!”
Salvatore only shrugged. He went to the fire pit and began the seven days history and rededication of Ata.
During those days and nights I wandered around the island like a lost man. I did not sleep, and I ate little. Round and round in my head whirled the question of what to do, what to do. My goat followed me, silently at my heels or jumping ahead of me when we climbed the hill.
On the last night of the spring ceremonies we climbed the hill together. We sat in the fresh new grass on top of the hill, and I put my arm around the goat’s neck. “What’ll I do, eh?” I said to the goat, who promptly folded her legs, nuzzled against me, and went to sleep. I curled up with her, closed my eyes and dozed off. And for the first time in years, I had a clear, vivid dream.
I was in the London Underground. It was all clear, the musty, hot-air smell, the grimy tile walls, the posters advertising women’s underwear and opera. I walked from one tunnel to another, people rushing past me, hurrying somewhere. I wandered slowly, aimlessly, not knowing where I should go. Trains rushed into tunnels and stopped. I watched the people crowd on and off. I got onto a train, rode for a while, then got off and wandered through another station, and another, and another, aimlessly getting on and off trains which rushed me to places but not to a destination.
Then I was on an escalator. It was one of the oldest ones, with dirty wooden steps, a great steep escalator that went from the depths of the underground up to the street level. I seemed to ride slowly upward for hours. I could not see where I was going, and I was suddenly alone, the only person on the long escalator.
Then I reached the top, and, stepping off the escalator saw the sign WAY OUT ahead and above me. I walked toward it. Standing under the sign was a ticket-taker, a black woman in the usual dark blue uniform. She smiled and held out her hand. I looked at her face and saw that she was Augustine.
I jumped awake, shivering with cold. The dream had been so vivid and clear, more clear than what I saw in the early dawn light. I hurried down the hill and ran to my ka.
“I have dreamed,” I said, and told my dream to Chil-sing, who was now a robust young man with his golden hair tied back in a woven cord. He smiled happily when I mentioned Augustine and began at once to tell everyone that I had seen her already.
I thought about the dream for the rest of the day. I could hardly wait for night, and after the last “nagdeo” was said, I closed my eyes and waited. And waited.
Of course, I was too tense to sleep for a long time, and when I did fall asleep, the sleep was shallow and dreamless. I kept waking up anxiously asking myself if I were about to dream. This went on for several nights.
“Am I trying too hard?” I asked Salvatore.
“Perhaps. Under tension, even if you can dream, the dreams are of little use.”
“What should I do? Tell me how to dream better, Salvatore.”
He smiled broadly and stretched himself. “My kin, I have waited a long, long time to hear you ask me that question.”
“Then you must be ready with the answer.”
“There are many answers. Not THE answer. I can give you some answers, but not all.” He settled himself, sitting cross-legged, and his speech slowed, as if he were thinking and considering very carefully everything he said. “Simply to dream is not enough. There are many, many kinds of dreams. They exist perhaps on different levels.
“There are the simple dreams that tell us of a body need. If we are thirsty, we dream of drinking or if we have eaten too much we dream of someone standing on our stomachs. (Yet to dream of thirst when your body is not thirsty is something else entirely—but I do not want to speak of that yet). These simple dreams tell us much and are very valuable. Especially if they tell us something we would not know when awake, some inner strain or beginning of dis-ease that we should correct.
“Yet, no one is content merely to have such dreams. So we try to live in such a way as not to make these warnings necessary; each person must find what is the right amount of food, drink, work, as if to keep a rhythm going, a dance, in which some imbalance causes us to miss a step in the dance. We try to live so as to get beyond these dreams, and to get beyond them we must obey them, or we must dream them until we do.
“Other dreams tell us deeper things about ourselves. These are not simple dreams any longer. Sometimes they are very direct and sometimes veiled, but they come only after the simple bodily dreams go. And it is even more necessary that we obey them. For instance, your dream of writing was such a dream that had to be obeyed, why, I do not know. But as you advance, you will find that the messages of the dreams become less direct, as though the higher messages find difficulty fitting into a language that will reach us.
“Then there are the dreams in which we open ourselves to other people, dreams in which we find that the words and gestures, the crude and indirect ways of our waking life, are not necessary. That we can be touched more directly. That we can listen and see better. Such a dream as the one you had last night.”
“You believe I received a messa
ge from Augustine?”
“I do not know. We can never be sure. Do you believe it?”
“I must.”
“Nagdeo!” he congratulated me. “Belief in the dream is as important as emotional discipline. Then there are dreams …”
But I interrupted him. “No, first I want to know how to have that kind of dream again.”
“But I have told you.”
“But I already had the dream. After being sleepless and hungry and all the things that should make me have trivial dreams.”
“Yes, you leaped ahead. You have done this before. But you have not repeated the dream, or gone on?”
“No.”
“And what does that suggest to you?”
“That it was a freak, a suggestion, just like, get a drink of water. A suggestion to turn toward dreams and learn how.”
“Perhaps. A still higher kind of dream is …” But I waved him away, and he fell silent. “Just as well,” he said with a smile. “Too much talk …”
“… is donagdeo.” I laughed and gave him a little salute as I walked away. I wanted to learn this ESP dreaming or whatever it was. I was too impatient to listen to much more theorizing about dreams.
Yet, even at that point, my whole life had made a complete shift, a greater change than had been made by my coming to Ata. For a long time my life had centered around Augustine and the writing. Now that she was gone, Augustine was even more the center, as the WAY OUT.
I had no doubt that I could learn how to get to her. After all, I had seen stranger things than that on Ata.
Salvatore had said that every man must find his own path to higher dreams. Searching for the path and trying to stay on it is absorbing and vital to the man who tries it … but I doubt it would be of much interest to my reader. Furthermore, if I were to set down the specific things I discovered about my own progress in dreaming, I might te guilty of making rules or laws, which, as soon as they are frozen, become violations of the spirit behind them.
Since I lived on Ata, there were no physical barriers to my progress in my surroundings. Ata provided the conditions and the freedom to choose or not to choose to live according to the universally accepted dream regulators: a simple diet, enough physical labor, few distractions, the company of people with shared values, solitude when desired.
I soon discovered that the real challenges lay beyond the acceptance of these material conditions, that no adherence to dietary or work regularity made up for the loss of rhythm resulting from an angry word or a malicious thought. But I have no time to explore such considerations here.
Let me merely summarize those next few years by saying that I learned that for me the best schedule was to get up at dawn and work in the fields until noon. Then I went to the grove where Augustine and I had spent so many hours. There I rested quietly and thought of her. After half an hour I went to the village and worked on the skins. As the sun began to lower in the sky, I went to a hol-ka where I spent the hour before sundown. Then I followed the others to the la-ka, where we fed each other and listened to the stories or watched the dance. It was now that I began to participate in some of the dances, which at first were very difficult for me, but which I found helped to create the harmonious disposition that often led to an especially vivid dream of Augustine.
I very shortly began to see her every night. She worked in the London Underground for a year. Then she worked as a servant in France. Menial work serves as a passport to anywhere. I followed her from country to country, always moving south, until she reached South Africa, where she stayed for a brief, terrible time.
Australia, New Zealand, then the orient, going north, then east across to Japan, then South America: she circled the world on her knees, scrubbing floors of the powerful, succoring the oppressed. Gradually she worked her way north to the States, where she settled for some time in the South.
I could see her, but she did not again look directly at me or show in any way that she was aware of my witnessing her. It was as if there were an invisible wall between us. I tried various ways to break through that wall by varying my routine, my work hours, my time spent in a hol-ka. But I could not get through to her. I could only watch.
She never lost the rhythm, the grace of her dance. Her most menial chore became a part of it. Every morning she rose and spoke as if she were telling a dream to someone, and when she was not working she sat in trance. I could never hear a word she said.
People gathered round her as they had on Ata. They kept getting between us. Finally at the end of every day she was alone. But then it was morning, and I woke up. My frustration became unbearable. “There’s some sort of time difference; it’s day where she is when it’s night here,” I told Salvatore. “I see her in her daily activities, but I can’t dream with her at night.” I tried reversing my sleeping hours, but that didn’t work at all. I simply stopped dreaming.
Then one night I saw her working in a restaurant in what seemed to be a northern city. She stood behind a cafeteria counter taking orders for food. I stepped up to the counter and tried to say something to her, but she interrupted me. “You cannot order anything,” she said very firmly. “You must accept what is offered here.”
It was the first time she showed by any sign that she knew I was in touch with her, seeing her. The next morning I told Salvatore about the dream and asked him what it meant.
“What do you think she is telling you?” he asked.
“Patience,” I said with a grimace. But I did not feel patient.
About this time Jamal and some of the other teenagers discovered that eating the petals of a certain flower would induce the most vivid and exciting dreams. For several weeks he and a few others lay about laughing or exclaiming excitedly. The adults ignored them, but I was intrigued with their discovery and determined to try it to see if it would speed up my progress.
The effects were dramatic. When I entered Augustine’s life, she was practicing songs in a small store front church. She immediately recognized me and threw her arms around me. I was ecstatic as I began to talk to her. But she did not want to talk. She began to pull oft the cheap print dress she was wearing. She ripped off my tunic, and on the alter of the little church, she pulled me down upon her, to make love. But it was not making love, it was thé practice of sex, such as I used to practice, a repertory of chilling incitements, mechanically performed. Her movements were precise and machine-like and they began to speed up, faster and faster. Her face gleamed in a sweat of lust, and her blue eyes turned red. I woke up screaming. Salvatore was standing over me.
“That wasn’t Augustine!” I insisted. “It wasn’t.”
“Right, my kin,” he said soothingly. “It wasn’t.”
“It was the flower. The flower did it. You must warn the people against it.”
“No warning is necessary. It is discovered and tried by nearly every generation. And then it is not touched again.”
It took me a long time to get back to the point where I could see Augustine clearly again. I was not tempted to try any more short cuts. In fact I was so chastened by this experience that I became especially careful to watch what the best dreamers of the island did, and to try to learn from them. What I learned was simple: more patience, more stillness, acceptance. They had, as they put it, nothing to teach me, and that “nothing” was everything.
At first faintly, then clearly, but still at a distance, I followed Augustine again. She remained in the United States. Now I patiently endured the people who came between us; though their appearance was hard to bear after my years on Ata, I began to look at them.
Their faces and bodies were ugly with dis-ease. They were petty and cruel and destructive. I wondered how I could ever have wanted the admiration of these people. I began to see that the Atan Chronicles were right in describing them as blind men before a banquet table who starve because they cannot see the food in front of them. The more they suffered, the more terrible things they did to escape suffering, thereby causing even more suffering.
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br /> Yet in all of this, I began to see acts of true kindness and love which shone like the jewels I had first seen in the la-ka. It was as though, from time to time, some people caught a glimpse of the life they had left. I came to understand that everything they did, however perverted, was truly, if they only knew it, a misdirected attempt to regain Ata. After watching them, following Augustine for over a year, I could feel nothing but pity for them … and even love.
And at that point the breakthrough came. I was resting by the river in our grove, thinking of Augustine. Suddenly she was there, just as she used to be, lying in my arms. I was afraid to move or to talk. I only hoped that she would stay. I held my breath. When I let it out, she was gone.
Again, I will not detail the daily progress I made toward keeping her with me for longer and longer periods. I do not think that I can explain the process in words that would make any sense to the reader. Let me make an analogy to the dance again: so long as I kept a certain rhythm, moved to a certain music, in everything I did, she was there throughout my waking activities, as surely and as clearly as she had been before. Anything that broke that rhythm—anger, impatience, sometimes just talking—and she began to fade away.
What began as a desertion was now a fuller closeness than we had ever had. At night when I slept, I watched her and stayed with her in all her activities, and now she saw me, acknowledged my presence, and welcomed it. During the day, she stayed by me for as long as I held the rhythm, and I bent all my efforts toward prolonging those times.
But do not think that the skill of keeping her with me was permanently gained. It too was like the discipline of the dancer. I had it only while I practiced; each day brought a new beginning of the discipline, and any period of disuse was paid for in hours of emptiness before I could regain the rhythm.
That was how seven more years passed. Life went on as usual on Ata. Kin moved in and out of our ka, keeping a more or less complete sleeping wheel. Chil-sing matured to the age I had been when I came, and showed signs of being a strong dreamer. Sbgai’s great lumbering body moved more slowly, but steadily. Some babies were born. Some old people died, Aya among them. When she died, Salvatore began to age very rapidly, as though hurrying to catch up with her and join her.
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You Page 16