Baja Journal, dreams of terror, 11/4 1985

Yellow light, fear of the light, no images. Two nights ago, I dreamt that John was floating on a red bed of light surrounded by purple and blue tendrils of darkness.

Each time the fear, the terror resurfacing in primal colors. He asks me for an image. And I say the red turned sideways like paper, it was two-dimensional, and then it disappeared with the image of John on it. Such terror. Whose death?

What is this thing in the night that comes bathed in pure light and wants to consume me? What is this thing that comes in the night, and what does it mean? The colors, not painted on paper but air bathed in light, all colors of the spectrum.

John asks me of the details of my birth, coming out of the swaddling sheets of darkness, into the world of pain and light.

I remember odd things: when the doctor hovered over me, how enormous his green eyes were behind his glasses as he looked down my throat. The silver mirror of light on his forehead, held by a band, he said breathe, and the darkness that followed. I woke up in a hospital ward, black-and-white with ceramic tiles. The white tiles yellowed and riddled with age, reminded me of teeth. The tiles ones with stripes of green, reflected on the wall.

The hospital beds folded like pieces of white bread. And my gown was backless and my ass exposed and my throat hurt. I failed to see any connection between  exposed ass and sore throat. I felt violated. The world had no logic. I was four. What were tonsils?

The black toilet seat was like a strange horseshoe open-armed to let me fall through to the swirling water beneath where darkness lived, gurgling in those depths.

I remember falling down the circular flight of stairs at my grandmother's house, the horizon of darkness and light shifting into jagged carousels as my head thudded and jarred on each step, to turning my world topsy-turvy. I was four. What did I know?

I remember looking at a three-story building, a long squat brown horizontal band of compressed windows. I had to give it height when I understood that it occupied space. From a bug's eyeview, buildings must be seen tilting our way, out of the horizon of sight.

When my new eyeteeth were uncovered from my palate, I slipped into darkness and the cinnamon odor of ether, my head pulled backwards into an orbit, into something like water but less tangible. Constellations of stars I'd never before seen, surrounded me and, like glittering eyes, the stars shone from the their dark bed of deepest midnight blue.

The roaring in my ears was like the ocean waves breaking on the rocks.

When I snorkel, I am in love with the blueness beyond the shallow sea floor and the rocks. We entered a small fringe of ocean and the fish were like wild bouquets of the sea drifting and floating amid the rocks. It is a privilege to look out across the blueness of the sea from below the silvery liquid mantle that separates air from sky, and sky from sea.

The blueness is so compelling, urging me to go deeper into the harbor, and into the bay, and down into the depths of the fathomless sea. I am Ophelia, I know the dangers of sharks, and the urge to go out, is so strong that I seek the rocks and the safety of the littoral zone like a frightened fish. The part of me that wants to abandon itself and slip fully into the blueness of itself. This is what the last thing a drowning man sees before the darkness robs color from the eye.

John's eyes are the color of the sea, bits of sky broken off, and I am afraid of that blueness and of those dark pools. The pool of the eye is like a black hole in space, as we enter the drowning sea.

The parrots' orange eyes have the same dark pools where we could drown if we looked into them too long. The darkness taking us into their limpid pools, not opaque with age, because age brings knowledge and this the sadistic tendency of nature.

A young rabbit runs towards the safety of the cat, a familiar shape that says mother, and the cat  nuzzled it and licked it lovingly before giving it the final blow. In this way, they young rabbit iscovered that all things were not its mother.

The innocence of the young, how nature, and the world shaped it, how the pools of eyes continually restore their liquid depths through love, pain, humanity – the journey of life.

In this, I begin to understand why the Indians, or the Indios have placed blue beads on the rearview mirrors of their cars to ward off the evil eye. They come to touch my turquoise necklace, to celebrate luck.

The dark holes of the eye, is the sadistic tendency of nature, the desire to hurt without malice, without cause.

I am reminded of the Irish saying: Love is a drowning in floodwaters.


I had 10/4/85 in my journal, but that cannot be the right date. I'm guessing that it's 12/4/85? It could also not be part of my Baja journal sequence, I found poems out of sequence in it.
added 2/18