Billie Holliday On Sunday Mornings
Henry Miller played the piano on Sunday mornings. His parents would lie in bed, awake, and would knock on the wall. That was the signal. Still in his pajamas and dressing gown, young Henry sat down in front of the old family piano, cracked his fingers and forgot everybody and everything surrounding him. He put all his fantastic genius and vitality in the notes and he was able to let them fly, just like he would be able to give words wings as an adult and a writer. Hitting the piano pedals with bare feet, he was perfectly at peace with the world. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he knew what was to come; he knew his wouldn’t be an easy life, he knew that his genius would single him out from the rest of the people, that is gift would be a blessing as well as a burden. That’s why he praised his Sunday mornings spent at the piano so much and that’s why he decided to remember them in his Tropic Of Capricorn.
I am thinking of Henry Miller while listening to Billie Holliday this morning. I often listen to her when I’m home and I need to chill. I listen to a lot of jazz stuff when I need to chill. Needless to say, I listened to nothing but jazz in the weeks following my trip to Saskatchewan.
It should have been a perfectly ordinary period but I felt restless. I was restless when I was at university to see my students and work on my books, I was restless when I got home at night. I would pace up in down in my almost empty apartment, a glass of whisky in my hand, the TV on with the sound down, jazz coming out of my stereo. Something had seen the light of day, deep down inside me, and was feeding on my anxiety. I couldn’t help being jealous of Gwendolyn’s father; my wife and kid had moved to L.A. two years before, and, even if we had never talked about the possibility, I was reasonably sure he didn’t want to live with me. I was reasonably sure he seldom thought of me, too. Therefore, once I got back to Saskatchewan, I resolved to phone him once a week and try to play a more active role in his life. I knew I was not good at it and I had never been, but I would do my best and learn. During our awkward calls, he listened politely and answered all my questions; I could picture his curly blond hair, his chubby hand holding the phone, his freckled face bearing a slightly embarrassed expression, his glasses. He was only eight, and yet he understood. I’ll rephrase it. He was only eight, that’s why he understood. After the things that have happened to me, I must have learned this at least.
Even though I would have never admitted it, I thought of Linda more that I ought to have. She was not extraordinary like her children and she wasn’t extraordinarily beautiful either, but I had the feeling we had clicked during the few moments we had spent together. I found myself wondering what could have possibly made her ex husband decide to leave such a loving family. That guy had thrown his luck away. And so had I, if truth was to be told. But I preferred not to muse on that.
I should have accepted that hardly anything had happened to me during my stay in Saskatchewan but I couldn’t. I felt it had been something important and, as absurd as it may sound, I knew there was more to come. I had started having my recurrent dream (the one I wrote to you about) where my left eyebrow turned indigo out of a sudden. And I couldn’t find an answer to my dilemma: had Gwen dreamed our encountered that night, too? Was that the reason why she had wanted to meet me? She wanted to quit school and she wanted to move to Portland because she wanted to live with her daddy: she may have thought I could be a means of achieving both her goals. This might have been perfectly reasonable. But why had she acted so rudely the day we had first met then? Why had she changed her attitude all of a sudden? The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself it couldn’t be because of the dream. But I couldn’t find any other explanation. Maybe I lacked the necessary information.
During the day I often found myself googling indigo children. I read many interesting websites, according to which indigo children were a new generation of incredibly gifted warriors whose task was to guide humankind through these dark times until a new, better era begins. I can’t say I believed what I read, but I found it quite fascinating. One day Natalie, my PhD student, caught me as I was surfing the net for information about indigo children. I knew she had a deep interest in poetry, just like me. And I suspected she secretly wrote poems, just like me. When she saw the website I was reading she asked if I liked their poetry and I replied that I had no idea some of those kids would be able to write poems too. As I was saying this I felt as if a piece of the jigsaw was clicking into place. But I had no time to linger on this odd sensation because I heard a soft knock on the door of my office. A good-looking young man opened the door and asked:
Mr.Eyebrow do you have a minute? My name is David Sourcil. I guess you’ve met my wife and kids.
Saskatchewan At Dawn
Can dreams interfere with our life? When the consciousness that we are dreaming intrudes in our oneiric life we seem to be able to control our dreams, but can we do the opposite? Art seems to provide a postive answer to this question. Art is the utmost expression of the power of control and the disruptive force of instinct at the same time.
This much was clear even to a man of science like me, an astronomy professor trained to approach things rationally. I kept repeating to myself my meeting with Gwendolyn in the dream could not be correlated to the phone call I had just received. My thoughts were racing and I decided to take a quick shower. I had no time to shave. In big contrast to my restless state of mind, Saskatchewan was waking up slowly, flooded by a ghostly light. It would be another cloudy and rainy day. I put my luggage in the truck of the car and took a minute to take a good, last look at the Canadian skyline. In the late afternoon I would fly back home.
Devi greeted me coldly as she got into the car. She had arranged to meet Gwendolyn, Jett and their mother Linda at the diner before the kids had to go to school. Even though I was driving I could tell she was looking at me suspiciously. Things between me and her had radically changed over the last few hours. Since we had been at Kinvarra’s exhibit, she had taken all the decisions and I had followed her like I had been her sidekick. She had shared her knowledge of indigo children with me when she had felt like it. I knew there were things she hadn’t told me. And now it was the other way round. She wanted to know why Gwendolyn had decided to see me out of the blue, she wanted to know what had happened, but she didn’t dare to ask.
Of course, if she had asked I wouldn’t have told her. I had learned not to trust the woman completely. She certainly had an aim in mind regarding indigo children and she wouldn’t share it with me, so I really didn’t know what to think of her. One thing was for sure, she could be very manipulative. Besides, what could I have told her? That I had met Gwendolyn in my dreams and she had met me in hers? Was that the reason why we were driving to the diner? I simply could not believe it.
Anyway, I was a few minutes away from the truth.
I’d love to thank everybody who’s been reading my story so far: I wasn’t expecting to have such nice comments and someone even devoted a post to my blog. I hope you’ll keep reading it and tell me what you think about it (please feel free to tell me if you think I should have acted differently).
A Vivid Dream
I was jogging in a desert neighbourhood. It was night and I didn’t know where I was nor where I was going, but, strangely enough, that didn’t seem to bother me that much. I would go as long as my feet kept going. The harsh sound my trainers produced on the iced pavement made me feel less alone. It was like I know there was someone there, in tat part of the world, a kindred soul.
As soon as this thought hit me, I realized where I was. The diner was still quite far from me but I could see it. I couldn’t tell whether the lights were on or off, though, so I sped up. As I got close enough, I noticed that someone had dimmed the lights and was moving inside the diner: I could see a shadow stretching on the pavement outside the window. I went inside.
Gwendolyn put a cup of hot tea on one of the tables and sit down with a magazine in her hand. She barely took notice of my presence and greeted me with affected coldness. It was obvious it was her and her arrogant behaviour proved the girl sitting in front of me was the same I had met the previous afternoon, yet she looked different. Her hair was much fairer than I could remember, almost albino. Every single hair of her body, her eyebrows and her eyelashes were almost white. And she was not trying to hide her beauty anymore, she didn’t seem to care about concealing her femininity, still in its unripe state, any longer. She was wearing a long black skirt and a purple red blouse. Le rouge et le noir, I couldn’t help thinking. Death and Passion, Order and Chaos.
I couldn’t explain how the idea came to me, or what gave me the certainty that it was correct, but all of a sudden I felt I was there to see right through Gwendolyn’s soul: an angel-haired child whose feelings could be dangerously deep. Absorbed as I was in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed Gwendolyn staring at me until she exclaimed You, as if she meant to say You, of all people! I instinctively looked down at my clothes and realized I was wearing an indigo shirt. Very strange. I never owned an indigo shirt, I’ve always thought grey, brown and black would be more appropriate in the academic world. And, if black and red represented Gwendolyn’s soul, what would indigo say about me? I couldn’t think of a possible answer, because the girl added I’ve never thought you could be… She sounded genuinely shocked and as I raised my eyes I saw her pointing at something above my left eye.
The phone rang and woke me up. According to the alarm clock it was six am. I lazily picked the phone up. It was Devi, she said Gwendolyn had contacted her to ask if she could meet us at the diner before she went to school. She had expressly asked to talk to me.
The Dream
It happened again: last night I had that dream again. Maybe it is because the last thing I did last night was walk up to this library, start my blog and walk home thinking about the inexplicable things that have been happening to me.
Over the last few years I’ve had a terrifying recurrent dream. You couldn’t call it a nightmare because there are no violence, pain or fearful elements in it. The most fearful thing is its recurrence over the years and the effects it has had on my everyday life. The dream is very simple: my life is completely back to normal, I’m still an internationally renown professor and, as I’m in the middle of a conversation with somebody, be it a colleague or a student, the person I’m talking to suddenly stares at something above my left eye. I try to carry on the conversation as nothing had happened, but I know what’s making my interlocutor look so nervous: my eyebrow has abruptly turned indigo. The reason I know about this sudden change in my appearance is due to the fact that I’ve had this dream so many times I perfectly know what has happened and how it is going to continue.
Nevertheless, last time just like any other time, I found an excuse in my dream and left the person I was talking to in order to go and check my reflection on the first available surface. As expected, last night as a million nights before, the image that was reflected on the glass door of my office showed a pleasant, middle-aged man whose left eyebrow was indigo.
The first times I’ve had this dream I found it slightly disturbing, but it has become quite obsessing over the years. I carried out an extensive research on the symbolic meaning eyebrows have in dreams. All books seem to agree on the fact that eyebrows denote that the person who dreams about them will encounter sinister obstacles in their immediate future.
Someone has booked this computer so I have to go, next time I’ll tell you more about my story. Today I’m still shaken because of the dream so I told you about it; it’s part of my story anyway.
Talk to ya’ later
