I dreamed about this song. All I knew was the title and that it was being released on a compilation of experimental music which also included a song by Scott Walker. No, of course I don’t think I could stack up to him. But yet the dream seemed auspicious. I needed to bring this dream song into waking. So here it is.
Walhalla, South Carolina. “Garden of the Gods”, as the city’s tagline goes. And a perfectly accurate tagline too, as we’ve discovered.
Our first visit was sparked by a desire to explore a new tunnel–any tunnel. I’d looked at an online map of the region and merely searched for “tunnel”. Stumphouse Tunnel was the one which caught my eye first. It was an incomplete railroad tunnel from the 1800s and seemed fairly intriguing. So my partner and I packed our bags, made a reservation at a cabin, and left as soon as the weekend arrived.
We arrived at the small southern town of Walhalla soon enough. Quaint, and somewhat typical. We then drove up the mountain road towards our chosen tunnel, and parked. An overwhelming strangeness, standing before the mouth of it. It beckoned us, it pulled us in. Into its darkness. A chorus of water droplets fell around us, the soft sound mixing with echoing human voices. All this combining into a beautiful accidental song, a hazy underground communication. Like those “spirit boxes” which jump rapidly through different radio signals, creating a wall of noise which sometimes opens up into a clear signal, into an otherworldly new vista.
The atmosphere inside was intoxicating. Each step was a step forward into an unknown world, into unknown mental landscapes. The darkness was thick, yet we were amazed we could still see. As though we ourselves were changing, transforming into a creature of the night. Becoming more and more goblin, with each step. Perhaps our teeth were growing longer too, perhaps our ears were growing wide. At the very end, a large grate blocked our path. We would not be allowed to pursue our tunnel’s magnetic pull fully. A distant light flickered far away in the distance, hinting at secret wonders not meant for us. I slipped an offering through the grate; a sticker I’d been carrying in my pocket. One of our magick sigil stickers. My partner put their ear to the grate, and listened intently. They had an overwhelming sensation of someone on the other side of the grate, with their ear to it, too. Listening to us listening to it.
Eventually we left. We tried to walk to a waterfall, but had to cut it short when my sensitive ankle started giving me trouble. So we decided to explore the little town below, instead. My partner snagged their new tights on an ugly metal wreath in front of some shop. Inside another, we purchased an antique autoharp, only to later find out it was broken and overpriced. The day seemed to have shifted. Bad luck seemed a palpable force.
So we stopped at a little bar, attempting to soften the mood with an alcoholic potion. The alcohol worked its mysterious magic, and our moods soon enlivened. Tipsy and giddy, we drove back up the winding mountain road. An inadvisable idea perhaps, but there’s a special kind of exhilaration to be obtained by mixing three beers with a view of a sheer cliff drop off two feet away. We made it back anyway, back luck or no.
In our cabin by the lake, with our moods still rapidly fluctuating from pretty-ok to utter-shit, we decided to take a small dose of mushrooms. We sat next to the lake and watched the sun come down, our heads softly massaged by psychedelics all the while. A hazy mood draped over us both, as the night fell.
We happened to have some starburst candies with us – candy being a minor road tripping vice of ours. Before falling asleep I decided to leave three brightly colored starburst candies on a rock by the lake as an offering to the unseen entities of the forest, whatever they might be. The candies were yellow, pink, and orange. Later, I had a restless night’s sleep, and woke often. A feeling of being watched hovered on the edge of my consciousness. In the early hours I dreamt that three praying mantises the size of a small dog and with the bright coloring of the candies I’d left had landed on my back, in a strange kind of acceptance ritual. I wasn’t scared by them so much as a bit uncomfortable, and nervous. I asked my partner if they could be so kind as to gently remove them from my back, and place them back on solid ground.
We woke up early the next morning, feeling rather odd. We decided to start the day with a second trip to the tunnel. To try and get some voice recordings in it, before all the people arrived. On the way out I noticed that the candies were gone. Taken by the mantis spirits, maybe. We got in the car and turned the key–it wouldn’t start. Shit. Another setback. I felt as though the entities of Walhalla had absolutely everything to do with it, with this weird luck of ours. A hive of tricksters. We walked around the rim of the lake towards the park ranger’s office, my ankle smarting again. We caught the ranger there, thankfully, and he drove us back to our cabin. There, we hooked up some jumper cables, and then got it running again temporarily. The first auto shop we went to downtown had the battery we needed, but no one to install it—just a lone cashier. So we drove to the second shop in town. They had someone who could do the install, but not the right battery. So back we went to the first. We bought the battery there, then drove it over to the second shop once more. We begged the mechanic to put it in. He agreed, that saintly auto-man. The whole long episode was so comically absurd, we couldn’t really help but laugh through the pain. We left Walhalla then, never expecting to return.
But then we did. It was about a year later, and we found ourselves driving down the road towards Walhalla once again. On the way, we came across a homeless man at the crossroads, begging for change. My partner said it would be auspicious for our trip if I gave him something, so I handed him a $5 bill. On the outskirts of the Walhalla, a large wooden bigfoot cut-out stood on the side of the road. We saw it out of the corner of our eye, and it scared the hell out of both of us–as though it were the real thing. Anyhow, we were heading straight to the tunnel again. This time, we were planning to film and record inside her. Part of a visual album which we had been working on called “Land of My Soul”, the climactic scene. We arrived around midday, just as some people were leaving. We reached the mouth of the tunnel, and I began recording. I figured I’d film while I walked in, to at least keep it going until I ran across someone, or until the camera went dark. We entered, and kept walking. No one here. Not a soul in sight. At least, no human ones. I kept walking, my camera kept filming. My partner sang automatic sounds and words. We walked the entire stretch of the tunnel without a single interruption, and the camera never went fully dark. What luck! I couldn’t believe it. We managed to get everything we needed within the first five minutes. As we stood by the grate at the end, groups of people began to arrive, crowds of families. What perfect timing we’d had. We could’ve waited all day and never gotten a fully empty tunnel. Apparently, on this particular visit, our luck would be good.
We left then to walk on a nearby forest trail, one which promised some additional tunnels. Along the way, an unassuming rock terrified me. I’d seen it out of the corner of my eye, and, somehow, my mind had thought it a predatory animal. This was the second time today that I’d been frightened by something inanimate–not a thing that usually happens to me. We mused then that perhaps, on such occasions, there is in fact something real and menacing hiding there. That an unknown cryptid or surnatural entity has camouflaged itself as a non-threatening object, and that what you are sensing below the threshold of consciousness is the reality behind the mask. Ha, and what if the reverse is true too? What if sometimes trees, rocks, and other inanimate objects camouflage themselves as menacing cryptids? A ruse, to chase off or intimidate some ill-mannered, presumptuous human? Yes, it could be. It could.
The first tunnel on the trail was cut into the side of a mountain. The mouth was low and small, so I got down on all fours and scurried in. It was dark inside, and there was a large metal fence further in that prohibited full entry. I touched it, and it felt wet. I listened, and I thought I heard something strange. Did the gate prohibit entry, or did the gate deny exit? Was it a prison, or defence? My partner came in after me. They pulled out their recorder, and read a poem to the darkness, one which they’d written earlier. A sort of hymn, a love letter to our Stumphouse Tunnel:
song turned to ice
turned to liquid
turned to stone
lute under mountain
play me a tune
a tune to bring the bright world
into the dawn
there is a passage
into the dream
and a song of the dream
the water is the word
and the wing
drift slowly
into a new time
hollow house
beauty in the space of you
the air that holds you
is the air you are
our breath becomes the dawn
The first reading was perfect, but I urged a second recording just in case. They refused, saying they’d become filled with an overwhelming feeling the longer they’d stayed in here, a very heavy emotion. They wanted to leave immediately. So we made our exit. As for myself, I felt more or less at home there, and they joked that I was a secret goblin. Between my love of tunnels, and my fascination with crawl spaces, perhaps they were right. In fact, I did once let a goblin crawl in my head and pilot me like a mech during an occult ritual with some Atlanta witches. But that, dear reader, is a story for another time.
We continued walking, eventually reaching the final tunnel, and the end of this branch of the trail. This particular one was fully underwater. We sat down and watched in silence. A frog danced and croaked in the murky stew at its mouth, while the sun shifted merrily across the stones. The patterns of light along its edges were like scales on a great lizard’s back.
Much later, holed up in a rundown motel, we sat staring at the grey cinder block walls, thinking back on our day. I happened to have some tropical mentos candies on the side table next to me. Our roadtripping vice, as I mentioned earlier. I decided to repeat our earlier experiment. I pulled out three of different flavors, went outside, and placed the three round orbs side by side in the parking lot. Offerings to my little goblin friends. I was a bit worried about attracting gremlins to the car again, but then, our luck seemed to be much better this time. So I took a little risk.
We turned on the TV. Leprechaun 2 was playing. The leprechaun in question was seen chasing a man and a woman around a cave, trying to get some special golden coin from them. He was tricking them, using magic to pull the wool over their eyes. Rewriting the rules of reality. A tricker par excellence. And this cave he was hunting in, it was not at all dissimilar to our Walhalla tunnels. Sometimes, the Goddess Chance can offer up her synchronicities through the humble medium of camp.
Scene from Leprechaun 2
Another restless night waited for us, a night thick with dreams. For myself, I dreamed of exploring a strange asian strip mall, emptied out and decaying. I ran across a friend there called Raelixe, and she showed me a journal covered in drawings and asemic writing. Then, she showed me a shark plushie she was carrying. It had a creepy set of human teeth in its mouth, and the teeth were covered in blood or possibly lipstick. Lastly, she told me of a new internet discussion board she’d just set up, the topic of which being the occult connections between the show Seinfeld and the apocalypse of the Book of Revelations. Would I be so kind as to join it, she asked? I don’t know if I ever did, because at this point, I woke up. As for my partner, they spent their night dreaming of finding lost items in a ditch. Coins, jewelry, keys. And then, of dropping these little coins everywhere inside a hotel, and of having to meticulously pick them all up again.
In the morning we threw our clothes on, grabbed some dull motel breakfast, and headed for home. We’d considered exploring the local mountain trails more, but after thinking on it, we had decided against the idea. In Walhalla, it’s best not to push your luck.
We’re pretty sure Odin is still in there, waiting.
We only walk Piedmont Park at night. We advise you to do the same. Because the park of the day is not the same park, not at all. Because at night, a strange doppelganger takes its place entirely. The whole landscape becomes Someone Else. Dr. Jekyll? Meet Mr. Hyde. Every surface is infused with a kind of magickal static electricity. Go ahead then, try it. Touch any random bench. See? Ghosts nip at your fingertips. I once made a sticker that advised its viewers to “Shed a little shadow on the subject–some things are seen better in the dark.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in Piedmont Park after sundown.
We’ve been undergoing this ritual for quite some time now. It begins with a trip to The Independent, a local pub. A pitcher is downed, and then? We board our diving bell, sinking deep into that darkening field. By the time we reach the center, our city has died away. Becoming a distant mirage, a memory. Merely far off lights, as inaccessible to us as the stars in the sky. And so we wander.
Once, we followed a side path into the forest, and came upon a waterfall. Majestic and moonlit it was, a place for strange happenings. Our bladders were full, so we decided to enact one ourselves. My partner sat on a granite boulder and let their pee fall into the stream. I stood before it, unbuttoned my fly, and watched the golden elixir mix and transform and transcend inside of the crystalline pool. Bizarre alchemical marriage, enacted by surrealist drunkards. Presided over by Queen Moon. A few steps later we found a proper restroom waiting for us. But we wouldn’t have given up that waterfall experience for anything.
Another night, another mystery. We crossed paths with an imposing stairway, and we climbed it. At the top, we found a labyrinth formed of black chain link fencing, the edges of tennis and basketball courts to be exact, yet our imaginations inflated it with a sense of strangeness and potency. We navigated the dark tunnel with minds ablaze. An open door beckoned us to enter, and we did so, studying the cryptic geometric shapes on the ground before us. Circles, lines…was this a basketball court, or a page from Ars Goetia? We decided on the latter. We locked our hands together and spun around the circle, shouting automatic gibberish as we turned. Finally, dizzy and delirious, we joked (but only half) that we’d summoned a demon of unknown make and model, and that we’d better watch our step. We left the labyrinth then, descending another impressive staircase. At the foot of it, an enigmatic call broke the night’s silence. An owl we thought, and yet somehow otherworldly, too. Our unknown demon friend, come a-calling? The demon Stolas, perhaps? Nothing doing but to follow the sound, and find out. The call led us to a very tall, very old tree…and then this call stopped. So we abandoned our search, and sat on a nearby bench. Eerie blue cop lights sparkled in the distance, in beautiful predatory warning.
– Stolas, as seen in Shin Megami Tensei (left) and Ars Goetia (right)
A common locus for our wanderings here seems to be the gazebo that hangs over the lake. Occasionally, it will emit an oddly menacing aura and is avoided. But usually, we sit down here, listening to the half-sleeping duck murmurs a few feet away. Sometimes flower petals cover the ground—trivial wedding leftovers, no doubt, but oddly poetic in the comfort of the night. And strange calls are heard near this lake, too, always strange calls. Avian cryptids, heard yet not seen.
We once sat at the center of the “Active Oval” section of the park, watching unnaturally fast, unnaturally short shadow figures running around the edge of the oval. Children, perhaps, but most likely phantoms. Or fae. It was somewhere around here too, wasn’t it, that one of the earliest film projectors was first displayed? In the fall of 1895, at an international exposition. The “Phantoscope.” What a perfect name. Perhaps we were merely seeing filmic echoes, Victorian ghosts…
An essential part of our nighttime ritual appears to be the aspect of the “pilgrimage.” The walk from our apartment is quite long, and for two days in a row we tried to cut it short, to cheat. To drop the car off right next to the park itself and “get right down to it.” Our moods illogically soured as soon as we got in the car. Both times we circled the park arguing, feeling confused, and failing to find parking. Both times we suddenly abandoned the attempt, and headed straight home. With tails between legs…Piedmont Park is a veiled lady. She must be wooed first, as must every experience of the marvelous. Short cut = magick-mood killer.
On our latest trip to the park, we drifted towards Legacy Fountain. Halfway there, we spied two grown adults laughing and playing in the dark and empty playground. Emboldened by the night, casting off for a moment the repressive shackles of maturity…I thought to stop and pee in a restroom further up, but heard eerie singing coming from within, and thought better of it. Finally, reaching the field near Legacy Fountain, we decided to lay down and look up at the stars. I wondered aloud if we should check the ground for dog shit first with our phone lights. My companion countered “to check for dog shit now would be a betrayal of the experience..!” So we put ourselves in fate’s hands and fell into it. Above us, the stars seemed soft and whispering. Ready to betray all their secrets. We noticed Orion first, and then the Pleiades. When finally we pulled ourselves up off the dark ground, we realized that a couple that had been walking this way had retreated when they’d noticed us. Perhaps to them, we’d looked like sinister shadow creatures, floating up from the depths of the underworld.
We floated on, stepping into a shadow line cast by a nearby light pole and walking its length across the field to where it ended, then stopping briefly to marvel at the strange geometric shadow patterns cast by a stairway. Inside a nearby restroom, an uncanny atmosphere proliferated. An ideal place to get murdered or abducted by aliens, I thought. But in a good way. My alien hypothesis was further strengthened by the appearance of bizarre asemic writing next to the toilet. Had a confused Pleiadian crash landed here and then recorded on this wall its last sad SOS? Or perhaps he’d been on a drunken joy-flight merely, and had written a few naughty extraterrestrial limericks for his pals? We left the bathroom, and heard noises of a man or beast approaching from the leftmost stairway. We quickly scuttled towards the one on the right, and made our exit.
Reaching the end of our exploration, we mused over the fact that we never seem to leave the park by the same way we came in. For some obscure magickal reason, it feels as though one must always leave it by a different route. Near the exit a couple sat on the grass, painting in the dark. As I walked by I peeked at the canvas. Abstract patterns, circles and lines mainly, and animals. Immediately my mind went to aboriginal art. A hint, perhaps, that we were passing now through Dreamtime? The last thing we glimpsed as we left the park grounds was a shadowy figure running in the distance—barely visible behind the trees, heavy with the sense of portent. Just a typical night in the park…
Surrounds Game
As you walk speak into a voice recorder, incorporating things around you, wherever you happen to be, into a freewheeling improvisational text. This suggests the interplay of objects broken free from their utilitarian functions and reveals the hidden life of our surroundings.
– JF, DS, HC, SC
I spend much of my time daydreaming, gazing up at the ceiling, thinking of nothing or almost-nothing. Sometimes these absences lead somewhere interesting. Sometimes they don’t. But today, as I vacantly stared at the ceiling, a hazy childhood memory floated in, breaking through the veil of pleasant nothingness. A very early memory. The kind of vague, dreamlike memory that you are never even quite sure was the memory of a real event, or merely a mislabeled dream.
It was a fairly simple one – a memory of an architectural space I had spent an hour or two in with my mother once, somewhere in Atlanta. But something about the way the interior was constructed had fascinated me then. It had a large open space in the middle, and at one end, it seemed as though there was a building inside another building. Hanging plants descended from the sides of this interior building, and there were odd little terraces. Something about it felt unreal to me then and now, like the architecture of dreams, or science fiction. I thought of space colonies, and of the internet “Backrooms” series, with its irrational remixing and reshuffling of architectural spaces.
I also thought of that bizarre Italian horror film The Visitor from 1979, which had struck me most at the time for its bizarre ice skating battle(?) scene. I had noticed then that it was filmed in the very same building as my ancient memory, and had fairly successfully captured the uncanny atmosphere of that early childhood experience. Up until that point, I had never really been sure that the memory had been a real one. From this detail, I began researching online, and I finally found the name of the building. It had been called The Omni Complex, then later The CNN Center, and finally, The Center. I realized I’d passed the entrance to my childhood marvel a hundred times in recent memory, on stickering walks, protests, and other excursions, and had never even realized.
Digging further, I uncovered a (to me) fresh kaleidoscopic gem of Atlanta history. Apparently, when the center opened in 1976, it was host to “The World of Sid and Marty Krofft,” an indoor amusement park based on the various children’s shows of the Kroffts, such as the wonderfully bizarre H.R. Pufnstuf. A prime example of popular surrealism, if ever there was one. In the Krofftian imagination, everything is sentient, everything is alive. Castles have faces, and so do flutes, and even hats. It is the animism of childhood…a kind of live-action Max Fleischer world. And this park in Atlanta took it one step further, too—because a person could travel up that absurdly long escalator, and find oneself arriving in this very material realm of Unreals. A person could become a part of the Krofft’s world in real time, the inner melting towards the outer. A Cartoon-World, infecting the skin of the Real. One could ride crystal carousels, become a pinball in a massive pinball machine, and much more besides. In this place, puppets lived and puppets breathed. Unfortunately, after six months the entire place closed down. It had been barely attended, and was a total financial catastrophe, like most everything else decent in this world.
No choice then, but to hop on a train and make a pilgrimage to this building—like a salmon returning upstream, thirty-something years later. Back to my hazy past. I walked inside, and the first thing I noticed was its utter emptiness. CNN having vacated years ago, the place was now peopled primarily by the dead – by memories. In the central area, the entire escalator was wrapped in white fabric and unusable. An unseasonal Halloween ghost. At the top of it, a giant earth waited awkwardly, a weird relic from the gaudy CNN days. It reminded me of the Krofft park’s distortion of size inside of their pinball machine ride, yet in reverse. Instead of pinballs, we were now giants, observing that troubled human planet from the sidelines. Gods of empty space.
We found a forgotten stairway in a corner and followed it up to yet another desolate atrium. Empty chairs waited for dwellers who never appeared. Strangely interior hotel windows looked out onto the corpse-like space, a few with their curtains open and their lights turned on. Hinting at occupants, yet no movement was ever seen. I thought of the best of those “Backrooms” episodes again, the ones in which the monster never actually appears. Because the true star, and the real horror, is always the atmosphere of the place itself. Which is the atmosphere of the ghost, of the absence which becomes a presence. Felt, never seen. As much as I’d love to suddenly see a demented H.R. Pufnstuf peeking out from around the corner of this hotel hallway, it’s enough just to feel as though he’s waiting there around the corner. Some spaces help one realize the very real truth that anything can happen in reality, at any time. This is one of those spaces.
Indeed, I realized suddenly that this building had turned into a totally new kind of amusement park, one consisting of nothing-presences and carousels of stillness. Everything in it was simultaneously dead, yet alive, like an inverted shadow version of all those talking houses and flutes of the H.R. Pufnstuf show. I was struck by how well my present experience of the place, in this distant future world of 2025, was a match for the dreamlike feel of an early memory, and of the particular memory which spawned this exploration. It was as if this building, along with others like it, had been molded under the dark gravity of our collective memories—a kind of architectural possession. The building itself became a Krofft puppet, pulled by unseen strings. Perhaps we humans exude a peculiar virus to infect our material surroundings over time. A virus called Haunting.
All this then, from a passing daydream. A kind of lesson there, perhaps: a reminder to keep the door of your mind open, or at least cracked, whenever possible. For who knows what unexpected guest might appear – maybe even H.R. Pufnstuf himself – to guide you down that magic path towards the Marvelous…
Combination of the silhouette game + diagram game with a UFO focus.
– JF, DS, SC, HC, AM, RC, E
Magic afoot.
We were told to take a walk through the city, and to hunt for these two things:
a mole
&
a rose
I wrote the words on my feet. “Mole” was repeated on the right. “Rose” was repeated on the left. A spell, an attractor. An irrational idea, that I knew somehow would work. The feet shall know with a certainty all occult secrets which the mind shall merely intuit. So I listened to the guidance of the toe, and was not deceived.
We discovered the mole’s burrow on North Avenue. It was cold, crystalline. Dripping water had created intense stalactites, some perhaps seven or eight feet tall. We walked deeper in, and deeper. Concrete archways grew at the center of the tunnel, wise and menacing. My friend was overtaken with a sense of the grave, with the idea of a graveyard underground. The empty spaces created by the arches were like gravestones, they said, and these invisible gravestones had a corresponding material gravestone elsewhere, too. Perhaps in Decatur Cemetery, where the werewolves rein. We thought of our own deaths too, here in the underground. Looking above at the stalactites, one thought of little else. What kind of unwholesome, sick beauty might our bodies display, impaled through by these translucent spears of ice? Cars rushed by, wrapping us in a soft cocoon of sound. Ahead, a strange and slow figure creeped. Hunched over, with head and body covered in thick brown winter clothes. A fairly short human, even by our standards. We watched as they made their way to the burrow’s open mouth. We tried to hang back and avoid them, but eventually we had to pass. The brown figure cried gibberish at our backs, half in song. Gibberish, or lost mole language? Meaning felt nearby, at the tip of our conscious minds. But not quite there, not quite. We never looked back. And as we left behind this burrow, we became convinced that the strange figure was the mole. A mole spirit, in human clothes.
A few hours passed.
To be honest? At this point in our walk, we’d forgotten the search for the rose. Too many aches and pains, too much hunger. We came across a small park, and, quite relieved, searched for the nearest bench. The first was broken, so we walked on to the second. And there she waited–the tiny rose. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Not a solitary rose, either. No, she waited for us on the top of a strange little offering, an assemblage. Beautiful in its irrationality. Something had sat here and slowly built this pyre. Had collected bits of twigs, bits of grass, bits of tree. And combined them in this very special way. For who? For us? For what reason? We tried to imagine the kind of entity which would do such a thing. A spirit perhaps, or a bower bird, or a child. We tried to imagine the state of mind that would cause this mound to come into being, and to make this state our own. For a long time we sat mutely in the stillness. Listening to the distant birdsong, letting the wind nuzzle kindly at our eardrums…
City trash men walked past us, breaking the spell. Asked us both “how y’all doing?”
Pretty well, sir. Pretty well.
Any sudden end of “business as usual” ushers in possibilities for everything that is neither business nor usual. Every interruption in the “normal functioning” of government and commerce reveals glimpses of a new society that is the very negation of such sorry afflictions. Momentarily freed of the stultifying routine of “making a living,” people find themselves confronted with a rare opportunity to live. – A River’s Revenge, Chicago Surrealist Group, 1992
We took a walk before dawn. The snow had already started falling. Falling from the moon itself, perhaps. The world was a quiet pocket of calm, emptied of all people. A soft apocalypse. In the mystery of early morning, everything felt like an extension of our dreams. We walked to the center of the crossroads, amusing ourselves by drawing a pentagram in the snow with our footprints. Summoning revolution, summoning the total reinvention of everyday life. No, it is not snow which flakes down from that silvery moon. It is the great goddess Poetry herself…
In Atlanta, a minor snow collapses everything. The cars retreat to their burrows. Businesses close down, and schools all shut their doors. It is as though capitalism itself freezes. Turning finally into an white empty mannequin, into a puppet unstrung. And these snow days happen so very rarely that they barely seem real. Distant memories of a half remembered dream.
The Great Blizzard of ‘93 arrived on the morning of my 6th birthday. I like to think that my childhood self dreamed it into existence in the night – as the absolute perfect gift. I like to think it, well perhaps I did. I ran through the snow in my puffy red jacket, and with my friends, brought several great white monsters into being. Ephemeral snow golems, marvelous beasts. Childhood’s most treasured tulpas. Eventually we all came back inside, to open presents and eat cake by the fire.
The Chicago Surrealist Group once wrote the following lines about the Great Flood of ‘92:
“The majesty and fertility of the river is as irrepressible as the desire for freedom. Dreamers of the world, dream like the flood!”
Dreamers of the world, let’s dream like a snowday, too.
–
CODA
by NIMOZ
what should i call you, night
besides night
whose feathers
thick, soft, black
have turned white?
what should i call you
at sunrise
when the night turns golden?
may i call you friend
when you hold me
in the heat
and the cold
and the rain?
i hope i will die
in your arms
with the stars
looking on
