A Poet Dreams of Transport and Conveyance

You put out bait to lure the fish.  Once you have the fish you can forget about the bait.  The purpose of a snare is to catch the rabbit.  Once you bag the rabbit you can forget about the snare.  The purpose of words is to get at ideas. Once you capture the thought you can forget about the words.  I would be content to find a man who has forgotten all about words so that I could share a few words with him.

From Chapter 26 of the ZhuangZi by Zhuang Zhou

I’m with Zhuang Zhou.  What I long for is a poetry that doesn’t fetishize language, a poetry that has forgotten all about words instead of lingering on all their lovely shapes, shades and sounds.  Oh show me such a poet so we can share a few lines.  But that, my friends, is such a hard place for poetry to go.   Poets of all people are the ones most inclined to forget that language is more of a trap than a prize.

Last night I had an interesting dream. I was traveling across country, east to west and then back again, hitchhiking but without using my mouth or thumb.  I was riding along in a big old truck, sitting alone in the back of an otherwise empty and windowless trailer, as it banged down the highway.  There were many trucks on the road and sometimes they would knock into one another.   And sometimes the trailer I was sitting in would detach from one tractor and reattach to another.  This mode of travel was unsettling, to say the least, a bit like being inside a pinball machine, ricocheting off the bumpers, except there were no flashing lights as you would find in a pinball machine, just a banging sound as the trucks barreled down the highway, knocking into each other, and the trailers passed from one tractor to another.  And the trailers didn’t always detach cleanly.  Sometimes one empty container collided with another and only the top half of the container got transferred over to the adjoining tractor.  It reminded me of the way strands of DNA recombine, not always making a clean break.  That’s what made this cross country trip so difficult for me sitting in back of an otherwise empty trailer.  I had to scramble up or down in order to avoid getting split in half myself or left behind.  And then I woke up.

Don’t you just love that phrase – and then I woke up?  It’s a cliché of the first order but it also strikes me as the only half-way accurate sentence in the preceding paragraph.  Everything else I wrote is far from adequate as a means of conveying the texture of my dream or what it felt like to be in the midst of such an experience.  When you are jolted out of a dream state you have to move quickly if you want to try to capture those fleeting images and feelings.  Dream journaling is like an autonomic process, as you try to write your way back into your dream state before it slips away.  In the semi-dark you grope for a pen and notebook by your bedside, then you stumble into the bathroom or hallway, anywhere you find a small pool of light, a place where you can sit or squat with just enough light spilling onto the notebook, so conscious awareness doesn’t prematurely chase away the vestiges of your dream truth.  And then I woke up.  Oh really?  Am I awake now?  And what of my dream – where is that now? How much of it has been preserved on the notebook page?

Dr. Glass (my imaginary shrink) would say that words alone are inadequate to describe or convey a dream.  What he means is that there’s no way to accurately tell the story of your dream until you understand it.  As usual I agree with Dr. Glass, sort of. Words are nothing more than a vehicle to understanding.  If we don’t reach the destination the vehicle itself is of no real use.  Sometimes after crouching by the night-light, furiously scribbling, you suddenly reach a clear intuitive understanding of what a dream means.  And then kaboom kabam – understanding rips through language and gives you back the most vivid truth of the dream itself and the words themselves you've been using to tell the story cease to have further use or value.  You re-inhabit the dream itself.

At least that’s what happened for me last night.  I scribbled and scribbled until I arrived at the crux of my dream.  Of course, I realized, this was just another dream about language.  Those trucks banging along the highway were words and phrases.  The tractors were the verbs rumbling ahead at a breakneck pace. The empty trailers were the nouns and dependent clauses that dragged along behind, constantly being exchanged.  Switching from one empty trailer to another -- that describes the process of writing pretty aptly, I think. And there I was being conveyed clear across the country and back again – not seeing anything clearly – no purple mountains majesty, not even a glimpse of the fruited plains.  I was simply jouncing along inside those empty tractor trailers, scrambling from one trailer to another, as the trailers were exchanged and recombined, hitching and unhitching from the tractors as they motored onward. 

What a long strange trip it has been.  Whether you’re a poet, a tinker or a tailor – is language a safe or sound means of conveyance?  And how will we ever know where it is we’re going let alone when we have arrived?