The Somnambulist's Dreams

by Lars Jerlach

  The dreams are truly enigmatic, but I am still at a complete loss to their meaning. No matter how preposterous they sound when I write them down, I can assure you I am not fantasizing. I can only promise that what I am telling you is a truthful account of the events. I am not losing my mind.

  He put down the sheet he was holding and gazed into the distance. After a while he slowly got up from the chair.

  His backside was sore and began tingling as he walked over to the window.

  As he looked into the night, he rubbed at his upper legs and his posterior to get the blood flowing again.

  Besides the rolling of the sea, nothing moved. He looked up into the infinite expanse above and wondered what it would be like to be floating in the empyrean space. Would earth become another minute puncture in the fabric of space? A tiny light in the crepuscule?

  He checked his watch. Thirty five minutes.

  He walked back across the floor and picked up the scarf and wrapped it around his neck.

  It was warm.

  He picked up the teapot, the cup and the lamp from the table and made his way downstairs.

  He put down the pot and the cup at the end of the stove, fished out the stones from his pockets and placed them next to the other two. He then lifted the kettle, checked the amount of water, and put it back down in the center of the stove. He took of the lid of the teapot, got out the bag from the cupboard, opened it and pinched a small amount of leaves between his fingers and added them to the lukewarm tea in the bottom of the pot.

  He looked as the dry leaves floated on top of the dark liquid. They slowly spiraled on the surface before they became saturated and languidly descended to the bottom.

  He thought about what he had just read.

  Although he believed he understood the conversation between Soule and the raven, he didn’t know how to make sense of the individual elements.

  He found the overall narrative incredibly bewildering and each individual story only added to the general ambiguity.

  Soule obviously believed that he had inhabited the body of a Japanese man, who, for nebulous reasons, had crawled into a well, and that he had been sharing a strange lunch with a white raven who bizarrely had resembled the young addict in the previous story.

  What happened after that he found beyond incomprehensible.

  If he hadn’t read Soule’s rational descriptions of the events, he would have said that they were undeniably the ravings of a derailed mind. Though he did wonder if Soule himself was fearful of losing his sanity, he was still of the opinion that he, although a fantasist when sleepwalking, was honest in his depictions.

  However, it became increasingly difficult to believe that Soule’s mind was not somehow affected by these fantastical tales.

  He closed his eyes and scratched both sides of his head with his hands.

  The fact that the raven had also been present in the African tale and had listened to the conversation between Soule and the bull also confused him. Why had it been there? What was it trying to learn?

  That Soule’s dreams were not communicating his own experiences was clear. He wondered for a moment if the individual fragments could somehow be a manifestation of Soule’s personal vision and made explicit in his dreams, but quickly dismissed it. From reading his descriptions he very much doubted that Soule was capable of such a feat. It was much more likely that these events were brought into existence fortuitously.

  The water boiled.

  He picked up the kettle and poured most of the water into the teapot and a little into the cup.

  Although they shared a profession, he was thinking about how ordinary his own life seemed to be in comparison to Soule’s. Although he didn’t actively seek these visions, and despite the underlying predicament they might symbolize, Soule’s nightly apparitions at least presented him with adventure and excitement, however bizarre the narrative.

  He stared at the teapot.

  He wondered how many times he filled, emptied and refilled it each day? How many times a day did he count the steps to walk up and gaze out at the sea? How many times had he checked the time on his watch? How many times had he wound up the mechanism?

  He wondered if the habitual pattern of his daily activities was the only thing that gave meaning to his life.

  He fished the watch out of his pocket. Twelve minutes.

  He walked over to the pantry, opened the door and grabbed the box of Graham crackers from the shelf. He removed two crackers from the box, closed the lid and replaced the box.

  He shut the door to the pantry and walked back to the stove where he picked up two hot stones and slipped them into his pockets.

  He then emptied the cup in the kettle, picked up the teapot and the lamp and went back upstairs.

  He put the teapot, cup and lamp carefully down in the corner of the table.

  He took off his scarf and wrapped it around the teapot.

  While he looked into the night, slowly scanning the horizon, he reached into his pockets. He lightly stroked the stones with his fingertips and felt a small twinge in his heart from the warm smooth surface.

  He checked the time.

  Four minutes.

  He walked over and wound up the mechanism and counted the revolutions. He stopped winding when he could feel the resistance in the weights.

  As he walked back to the table he checked the time.

  He put his watch back in his pocket, pulled out the chair and sat down.

  He picked up the teapot and swirled the tea within. He waited for the leaves to settle before pouring a small amount of fairly weak tea into his cup. He put the teapot down, lifted the cup to his lips and blew on the hot liquid before sipping a bit of the tea. It needed to stew some more.

  He put down the cup and picked up a new sheet from the pile.

  The Chess Player

  I was in a fairly large room.

  Darkness loomed outside the lone window and the room was lit by a single lamp hanging from the ceiling high above.

  I looked down.

  A pair of black scaly claws were holding onto the back of a high backed wooden chair. I jumped a couple of times and gently flapped my wings in the air. They were the colour of coal.

  I folded them, tucked them close to my body and surveyed the room.

  There were a number of strange objects in the space around me.

  What looked like a collection of sugar cubes, trapped in a tiny cage, were sitting on a teak sideboard by the wall next to couple of small bronze sculptures. One of them resembled a leaf lying on a small acclivity and the other an elongated handle of sorts.

  On a tall white stool next to me, a black bicycle wheel had been placed upside down, so that the neck of the fork was penetrating the seat of the stool. In the distance, cutting the room in half, a centrally placed large frame had paper cutouts between large sheets of glass.

  Most disturbingly, I thought at first a dead nude woman was lying in some brush next to a painting of a landscape at the end of the space. However, when I looked closer, I realized it was a life size female doll, holding what looked like a small lamp in her hand.

  There were a multitude of photographs, drawings and paintings displayed on the walls, all of which were as strange in appearance as the objects. One of the photographs was the image of a sitting nude woman with the drawings of the F-hole of a string instrument on her back.

  I must admit I was somewhat flummoxed by the collection of images around me and certainly by the candid nature of the motifs.

  Although I had never seen work like it before, I presumed that I was in the studio of an artist or perhaps a very eccentric art collector.

  In front of me, underneath a small steel lamp shade in the shape of an upside down bullet, was a fairly sizable table. An impressive wooden chess set was sitting in the middle and the pieces were positioned as if they were in play.

  The chess pieces were not of a design with which I was familiar. They were asymmetrical and quite outlandish looking and althou
gh I am a reasonably seasoned chess player, it was difficult for me to tell them apart.

  Both the pieces and the board looked like they were carved from Ebony and Maple and the shadows cast from the large pieces fell on the checkered pattern, creating a series of narrow recondite bridges between them.

  As far as I could see, I was occupying the white side of the board.

  On the other side of the table an old man sat on a wooden chair not dissimilar to the one upon which I was currently resting. He was smoking a pipe and his features were briefly hidden in the haze of smoke. He was so quiet I thought he might be dozing, but then he leaned forward in his seat and looked at me through the haze.

  He was tall and rawboned, dressed in a black sweater over a tattered black and white plaid shirt.

  His gaunt face was elongated and furrowed, like time itself had carved an effigy of linear events into his skin.

  His ears were large and fleshy and his thin hair had receded to the top of his skull. The skin under his eyes was slack and his dark eyes were lying deep in their sockets.

  His long prominent nose, high cheekbones and a cuspate chin, gave him the appearance of a large raptor. As he leaned forward to gaze at me his thin lips were pressed around the black mouthpiece of a pipe.

  He removed the pipe and held its glowing wooden head in his long bony fingers.

  “Nevermore,” he said, “you have finally arrived, and if I say so myself, not a moment too soon.” He spoke in a mellow not too deep voice with a trace of an accent I couldn’t decipher.

  He drew on his pipe and blew out a cloud of smoke that thickly enveloped the air in front of him, where it curled its wispy limbs around itself before slowly dissipating.

  His pipe emitted a hazy wavy blanket into the air.

  “I am not who you think I am,” I said.

  The old man looked at me through the haze. I don’t know what I had expected, but he didn’t seem at all surprised by the announcement. He just kept staring at me with his head at a slight angle.

  Finally he removed his pipe and used the black stem to point at me.

  “Who are you then?” he asked. “Are you Huginn or Muninn coming to check on my impending demise, so you can report back to your master?” He looked at me with interest. “I must say I very much appreciate the idea.” He paused briefly. “Although, thinking about it, it is highly unlikely that Odin would be interested in the wellbeing of an ancient chess player.”

  He again drew on his pipe and released another billow of smoke in the air.

  “However, as I am not currently aware of any other ravens that are capable of human speech, I must assume you are one of the two. That is, if you are not Nevermore.”

  He looked at me questioningly.

  “So which one are you?” he asked. “Huginn or Muninn?”

  “Neither,” I said, “Nor am I the raven from Poe’s poem. My name is Enoch Soule and I am a lighthouse keeper.” I jumped from one end of the chair to the other.

  “Enoch Soule,” he said with quite the emphasis, “ that’s a most felicitous name for a black raven, don’t you think?” The old man smiled. “A man who apparently didn’t die, joined with the word that is a close parallel to the ultimate essence of mankind.”

  He slowly nodded his head. “I couldn’t have thought of a more becoming name myself, even if I’d tried.”

  He looked at me approvingly.

  “I have never really thought about my name like that,” I replied.

  “Who named you?” he asked through his teeth, before letting out another plume.

  “My mother and father of course,” I answered.

  “Did they name you when you were a chick or a boy?” the old man asked, clearly amused by his own wit.

  “As a boy of course,” I said, and ruffled my feathers. “This is not my regular form.”

  “They must have had high hopes for you, bestowing you with a name like that. Or perhaps they were already aware of your destiny. Whatever the case, Enoch Soule is positively the most excellent name for you.” He looked at me and chuckled.

  “I was not aware that my name had a hidden meaning,” I said. “I always thought it was just a name.”

  “Nothing is ever what it seems.” The old man blew another plume of smoke into the air.

  “So what are you doing here Soule?” he asked, picking up a thin white porcelain cup from a small low table next to his chair. He took a sip and looked at me over the edge. “You must have a good reason to show up at an old man’s studio late at night. Or maybe you came to play a game of chess?”

  He smiled and his eyes twinkled in the dark.

  “I honestly don’t know why I am here,” I said. “Although, I doubt that I am here to play chess. Perhaps I am here, because you have something to reveal.”

  “You are putting a lot of pressure on an old man.” He put his cup back on the table.

  “So what do you want to talk about?” he asked, still smiling.

  “I don’t really know,” I said, shaking my tail. “Why don’t you tell me what are you doing here so late at night.”

  “Ok,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Most of the time I’m asleep in my chair. When I’m not sleeping, I’m playing chess and when I’m not playing chess, I’m thinking.”

  “What do you think about?” I asked, turning my head to the left.

  “Oh, it used to be about this and that, but these days it’s mainly about chess or sleeping.” He chuckled again, obviously happy with his witty reply.

  “How can you play chess against yourself?” I asked. “Does that not defy the purpose of the game?”

  “Initially you might think so, but I quite like to keep my mind occupied and the reality is that there are a lot of commonalities between chess and a lot of the things I used to do.” He gestured to the objects in the space behind me.

  I jumped around on my chair and looked at them.

  “You made all of these?” I asked. “Why?

  “That is an excellent question Soule,” he said, shaking his head. “A most excellent question, to which I do not yet have a satisfactory answer.”

  He picked up the cup and took a sip, before replacing it. He stuck the pipe back in his mouth and I could hear a muffled clatter as he clenched at the black mouthpiece with his teeth.

  “If truth be told, I find that there are quite a lot of commonalities between a game of chess and the work that I have spent many years producing. When you are playing a game of chess, it’s very much like you are constructing something greater. It is not merely about the position of individual pieces, it’s essentially about the overall design.” He was clearly warming to the subject. “The winning or losing is of absolutely no importance, but the game itself is very plastic. It moves in an expanse, which is no longer ruled by time and space, where it loses its cardinal meaning and becomes an illimitable number of varying sequences.”

  He looked at me.

  “Do you follow?” he asked politely.

  “I believe so,” I replied.

  “In many ways, the work I have produced over the last couple of decades share the same theoretical foundation. An object is always influenced by the context in which it is situated and every time an object is moved or something is added to its situation, one is essentially forced to reanalyze its position.”

  He paused briefly and looked at me through the smoky air, then continued.

  “I play against myself, because that way I can be completely unbiased. In continuously shifting my perspective from white to black and back again, I am not trying to force one upon the other, but to join two opposing creative elements into one combinational realm.”

  He blew another plume of smoke into the air and watched it as it slowly swirled upwards towards the light, where it drifted aimlessly before dissolving.

  “There is no winning or losing, only the eternal plasticity of the game itself.”

  He removed his pipe and smiled in my direction.

  “Nevertheless, isn�
�t it somewhat frustrating playing against yourself?”

  “Not at all,” he said, then briefly paused. “When you remove the element of victory, there simply isn’t a psychological or territorial conflict between the opposing sides. They are no longer dissonant. They are merely a collection of individual elements occupying the same domain, like smaller fragments in a much larger ecumenical whole.”

  He sat back in his chair and his face almost disappeared in the shadows, behind the hazy curtain of smoke from his pipe.

  “It is really no different than the colour of your eyes,” he said from the shadows. “One is light, the other dark and yet they operate ceaselessly within the same system.”

  His bony hand, holding the head of the pipe, moved into the light. The tips of his fingers were nicotine stained and his thumb was smudged by the ashes from the glowing pipe.

  “You are aware that your left eye is pearly blue and your right eye is as dark as the bottom of a well?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.

  “No,” I answered, “I can’t say that I was.” I flapped my wings in the air and briefly lifted my claws from the back of the chair, before settling down again. “As far as I know, they function as well as each other.” I looked at him first with one then the other eye.

  “Perhaps the colours of your eyes is just an exceptional coincidence or it is an essential part of your anomalistic arrival here,” he said after a while.

  “I do begin to wonder whether your being here is an exhortation.” He looked at the smoke snaking its way out of the bowl of his pipe.

  “Although, it could be entirely the other way around.” He looked at me with intensity. “Perhaps you didn’t arrive here, so I could reveal something to you. Perhaps you are here to reveal something to me.”

  He paused and gazed at me for what seemed like quite a long time.

  “So what is it Enoch Soule? Why are you here? What are you here to tell me?” He looked at me expectantly.