From R.M., I receive a copy of Leiris’s Nights as Day, Day as Night, a book of dreams. It is as important to know that such a book exists as to read it. Important to know that dreams can be remembered. Here are notes on three of my writing dreams (dreams dreamt while writing, not while sleeping).
Contorsion: image of the animal with a broken back. Image of the broken-backed creature crying out. I think of the teleported chimp in The Fly. What survives? Bones and flesh, twitching. Bones and flesh, grotesquely contorted, half-alive, still twitching.
Why is it that in bones and flesh do I see the truest image of the human, as though it was only in agony that a human cry could be heard? A human cry, and not an animal’s – a suffering, now, that is endured in bliss. For though the animal, like the human, comes close to death in that cry, it is the human who endures death and survives it. Who survives and love death like the salamander that would live in its flames.
What is this happiness, this desire for death? What is it, this desire, in which death is lived and lived by dying? How magnificently the human being turns on itself! How strange, and how magnificent, this turn into dying!
What does the image of the salamander tell me? Is it a dream? I wonder whether it is possible to dream in writing, to let myself, by writing, be brought to this dream, this dreaming. Salamanders, the contorted beast: each is an image, and an image among others. Is it the beginning of a reflection – a kind of root, from which new growth could take hold? Or is it, instead, the bloom of a marsh plant, the result of a refusal to begin (the marsh: the place without beginning; the shifting earth that never permits the beginning-place)?
Another dream. The water locked in the ground, in the permafrost, is melting. Above: the flash of the aurora borealis, and each star is as though drilling into the darkness; each is a stigma in the body of the night. Disgusting flowers bloom from the damp earth. Disgusting insects swarm around the flowers. The earth has become fetid; there is no death, only dying. What creatures live here? What creatures survive here, in the midst of dying?
Below the earth, the dead are dreaming. Below the earth, as the earth is unfrozen, the dead dream. But they were never dead, only frozen. The dead were never dead: this is my third dream. I am among the dead in my third dream. I never died, in my third dream. And then I know that sleeping is a kind of dying, or a survival of death. That to dream is always to dream with the ones who cannot die. And writing, what is that? Writing: awake when every animal is asleep. Writing, awake even beyond death. Writing: the salamander, the marsh flower, the dreaming corpse.
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