GENESIS: March 11, 1988

 

". . . love letters folded so intricately into paper locks that you couldn't open them without leaving a telltale tear . . ."

—Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

 

Once again, one letter's difference: The computer-generated unfolding sequence of a sealed letter. Credit...Unlocking History Research Group

I was sure I was dreaming, but I felt more wide awake than I had in weeks. The crazy nights of insomnia and daytimes driven by mania were done. It seemed I'd accomplished what I'd been destined to—or at least everything I was capable of.

I was dreaming I was writing a poem. Or, to be more precise, writing down a poem. But I was also dreaming about how tricky dreams were. They were like manic daylight visions, where you wanted to think you were grasping everything but always suspected something important was slipping through your fingers. If your mind had fingers.

Well, the fingers of my dream mind were now frantically jotting these precious lines on a blank sheet of dream paper. I was really hoping the sheet would be there, and poem-filled, when I woke up.

Then—bling—I was awake in my bedroom, and to my blessed relief, the lines were speaking themselves to me as if they'd been carved on the lintel resting atop the door of my mind.

I met someone from the corners of time

 and folded her into the centre.

I knew someone from the inside out

 and she unfolded me for the world to see.

Laughing and crying, singing and dancing,

we shared our pasts with the world

While grateful Time showered us with presents.

Once again, it was just a gnomic, gimmicky little thing, but also once again, it was mine, albeit given to me in a dream. I was fairly sailing the air with self-contentment as I entered the city hall cafeteria an hour later to join a gaggle of Carswellians for Friday morning breakfast, a long-standing tradition. 

I was pleasantly surprised to spot Monica at the table. Surprised and a little relieved, as I'd been wondering how she really felt about the strange vision I'd laid at her feet three days earlier, over lunch hour in the cozy little park behind the St. Francis of Assisi Catholic church around the corner. I could tell by her sharp intake of breath, when I showed her  the photos at the end, that the surprise was complete and that I'd done a good job of building up to it. I was to tell the Story, or portions of it, to many more people over the years, but rarely as skillfully or smoothly as that day with Monica. I even had my tape player cued up with specific portions of music (mostly Yardbirds, admittedly) to punctuate my narrative. And they worked, despite my lack of rehearsal. I was gifted with a passion and faith on that High Noon that I was never quite able to summon again—although not for lack of trying. 

Speaking of  passion and faith, in my barely controlled grandiosity I was comparing my situation to St. Augustine's long conversation with his mother, St. Monica, late in her life, when he set out for her his vision of Christian salvation in a series of steps—a stairway to heaven, if you will. (Naturally, I refrained from sharing this with Monica, the thing in itself being weird enough.) When my Monica reached the top of the stairway and recovered her breath and composure, she said, simply, "It's all too beautiful." I secretly wished I'd had the chorus from "Itchycoo Park" cued up. But that would have been too much.

Two days later I tentatively asked her what she now thought of the whole experience. This time, she was more guarded. "I'd like to pretend I understand it all, but it's just too gargantuan." 

"Good word," I said. "I can't say I disagree with it."

Now here we were sitting beside each other at breakfast, and I took advantage of a flurry of conversation that didn't involve us to tap her on the shoulder and unfold my poem for her from the piece of paper I'd been carrying in my pocket (with, it goes without saying, the Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket" dancing in my head.)

She read it, then looked up straight ahead and nodded slightly before turning to me. "You are really on fire these days," she said. I couldn't disagree. I guessed, with a considerable degree of accuracy, that I might never blaze quite like this again.

Our office folkie John Leeder arrived at that moment and passed me an LP I'd ordered through him some months before. I was by friends of his, a married couple, Lyn and Barry Luft (German for "air" or "flight," I registered), and titled Flower in the Snow. I was soon to learn that the title song concerned the visions of medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. And the flower in the snow was the yellow daffodil. The song written by English poet/songwriter Sydney Carter.

That would all come later. Now John McDermid and I were walking across the street to the  office. I passed him the same folded paper I'd passed to Monica. "It's Genesis, John," I said as he unfolded it and started to read.

"So I keep telling you."

"No, I mean the poem. I'm gonna call it Genesis."

He took a moment or two with it. "Well. Now we're gettin' somewhere."

In the elevator on the way to the 8th floor, I told him I'd written it in my sleep.

"Get out. No way."

"Not sure I could have written it myself. Not while I was awake, anyway."

"Sounds a bit like a wedding song."

"Uh, yeah, I guess. Hadn't thought of it that way. It's been quite a week for wedding songs."

I didn't have a chance then to explain that comment, because there we were, out of the elevator and heading into the main part of the office. . .

. . .  and into something else that seemed as if written in a dream.

The whole scene unfolded as if it had been scripted. After a quiet pint, or multiples thereof, the evening before, a few of the rascally Carswell inebriates had returned to the office and, for reasons known only to their febrile pickled brains, had filled many of the desk drawers in the vicinity of my workspace with popcorn. Needless to say, as this was discovered by the relevant desk owners, much perplexity and somewhat hesitant jollity ensued as the population of the entire office gathered to witness the absurdity. 

Then, as if on cue, and utterly unexpected even by the popcorn perpetrators, a small crew of workmen appeared as if summoned by the commotion. They weren't there for the popcorn, however; they had been booked by building management to replace a defective window—mine, as it turned out. This came as a complete surprise to all of us, including me. These windows were a formidable size, so it was not a trivial operation. I suppose if I'd been of a stuffy disposition I might have been miffed at not having been warned. To the contrary, I was dazzled and delighted by the weird resonance of it all. Here I had been reeling off-balance for weeks, as my perception of reality was shaken and jostled about (not unlike popcorn kernels in a popper, come to think of it), to the extent that I found myself incubating a new vision of my life, a new window on the world, if you will. And—presto—here was a new window, literally. 

We all stood around munching popcorn, watching what could easily have been a surreal finale of  some arty Italian film (ahem). The workmen slowly, meticulously detached the old window from its original domicile (where it been, presumably, resting comfortably and complacently since my initial arrival at this building in May 1978). We all uttered a sort of collective gasp as we saw the window itself. It had been sitting there nestled in the woodwork, so to speak, and now it was out of its context and, to us now, almost impossibly huge. One of the workmen leaned out over the suddenly imposing open-air expanse its absence had unveiled. Playing to the room, he quipped, "Hey, guys, I feel like Jerome the Giraffe here." That got a good laugh, except from our UK cohort, who had no idea what he was on about. 

As for me, all I could think of was the Donovan hit of yesteryear, "Epistle to Dippy," his musical letter to an old friend who has wandered abroad, plumbing the depths of psychedelic enlightenment, with its choruses of  "Looking through crystal spectacles, I can see you've had your fun / Looking through all kinds of windows/I can see you've had your fun." Yes, I'd had my fun, but I also recalled another line from that song: "Elevator in the brain hotel/Broken down, but just as well." Would the buttons in my brain elevator still work after all this? And if they didn't, would it be "just as well"?

I sidled over to Monica, who, having already been visibly jostled by my poem at breakfast, now confessed to utter bafflement. She revealed she was considering returning to university in the fall for drama, but had been unsure about what to do until then. "After"—spreading her arms—"this, I think I'll stick around here until then." She gave me one of her Jane Relf sideways smiles and gently nudged my shoulder.