Let me tell you about a beautiful Cancerian man who had the soulfulness and swagger of a young Frank Sinatra/with phosphene blue eyes back in the days when we were in love.
Usually, he shows up in Dreamland to smirk at me, and sidle around & make it clear that booting him from my life (he didn’t do anything wrong, by the way: I could not love) did not clear him out of my dreaming mind. Apparently, that’s a different process.
In my dream last night, he showed up, but this time it was because I was in his house. He looked at me and said andhere you are, accusingly, resignedly, and I said yes I know unhappily.
He lived in a house with a fantastic & illuminated portal that glowed, under which he stood like a young American titan. The portal was designed with Modernity in mind and was from that time during the Depression, when America needed to hold onto the past and look to the future, and sanctioned buildings and cars that (Janus-like) were vintage and futuristic, like the Citroën he drove.
I felt like a Goddard anti-heroine fragile & otherworldly & out of time in that car, never knowing where I was. Once, we left Los Angeles at 3 in the morning, and drove down the 405. The sky was murky, and gas flared from refineries in those tough little cities on the outskirts of LA, just before the river. My head was in his lap & his hand was on my head as he drove like a hero through a disaster zone.
I rooted around in his house. There were things of mine in there, I realized. I found a pair of black sling-back open-toed pumps. I took them, knowing they were old but still belonged to me, and that they had been point of friction for his soul, an irritant, a mote. In the meantime, he was stalking around, attending to other things, talking to other people, keeping me in his peripheral vision at all times.
Suddenly, I saw that the fantastic portal had gotten dismantled & pulled down. He was standing on the other side and laughing at me. To get out, he said mockingly, you will have to jump in, and pointed down to a moat filled with water that I hadn’t noticed before. It formed a barrier between his house and places that were not his house.
I don’t think I hesitated. I am not afraid of water. I jumped, and was fully submerged in the turbulent moat for several heartbeats. Water rushed around me & over me, and I fought back, pushing it out of my way. Then I swam to him and looked up. He put his hand out and I took it. He pulled me out of the water, and we embraced. We held each other closely, so closely.
We have never done this, I thought.
It is so sad, he said, holding me. It is just so sad.
Last night, I had a dream that a seal-creature hauled itself out of the ocean beside a private, bayside resort where well-dressed people sipped drinks on a green lawn.
It pulled itself out of the water and made straight for me. It wanted me.
This seal-creature was grey and had glowing eyes, and it pulled and tugged on a door that separated the outside from the inside, which is where I was. I was scared, because I know from my childhood in Newport Beach that seals can be aggressive and territorial. If you see one, my Dad told me, get out of the water. Seals are like dogs. They bite.
Seals bite, I thought. Seals bite.
The seal-creature pushed and tugged persistently on the door as the well-dressed people congregated on the overly manicured lawn. The lawn bothered me: why was there a green lawn next to a bay? Why the well-dressed people? Why was there an urban edge that separated me from the water? Lawns don’t go with bays. County clubs don’t either. Neither one had blocked the seal. I watched it trying to get inside with consternation and fear.
And then the seal was though the door. What it did was this: It swarmed into my arms, as if it belonged there and would never leave. It was fast and fluid and didn’t maintain shape, but it was a seal, with those glowing eyes. It molded itself to me, to my body. It wanted to be held. It wouldn’t let go.
I was confused, walking the halls of the glossy suburban space with the creature clasped in my arms. How could a seal, I wondered, which needs the sea live in an artificial atmosphere like this? I grew less fearful, and more concerned with each passing moment. It needs water, I thought. It can’t be outside of the water like this.
I put it down, tentatively. It flopped around, helpless, unable to move.
I thought perhaps putting it down would force it to do for itself somehow; make itself an environment of water, out of itself, out of sheer will. I thought it would make for itself an environment that would enable it. Help it to navigate and move. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t work.
So with some new tenderness (i don’t think it will bite me) I picked it up again.
“I leave myself as open as I possibly can. There’s been very few times in my life when I’ve really planned out a painting and then put it into form. The reason for that, is that by the time I’ve put it into form, I’m bored with it! I was tired of it…I’d already worked it out. Done and over with. I was just doing the mechanical work. So I try and leave it as absolutely open as I can and I start putting some color down, some paint, and let, uh…whatever it starts to say, come into form. And develop it from there.” Joan Brown, in an interview from 1979
February 19, 1998
The Family of the Rotten Potato.
I’m in a kitchen that is bright and has a table made of sunny yellow formica. There are other people, whose faces I cannot see. The perspective is that of a child, sat at a table with adult bodies bustling around me, getting, placing, working: all the absent-minded, purposeful movements of women (I think) in the kitchen doing the work of home. They are cheerful and content, and the kitchen itself is good, a warm and clean place, fine and bright. I wait. Someone is going to give me something.
Someone puts a plate in front of me. Placed on it is one potato. The outside is fine, but on the inside, there is a big ugly blot of black rot. It’s a sickly little potato that is rotten. I look around to see if anyone has noticed what I’ve been given, what I’ve almost eaten. I feel an excited pride, and no disgust. I want the busy bodies in the kitchen to notice what has been given to me, what gift has been bestowed upon me.
I know it means that I belong to the family of the rotten potato. I am happy about this.
April 2010
An Púca.
(I have no pictures of the Púca. Sorry)
I am relaxing in a bathtub, which is filled with pleasantly hot water and, I realize in a slow fade of comprehension, dirt and earthworms. I am submerged in an warm, earthen soup. There are other things, too, one of which looks very much like a very large coelacanth—a pre-historic walking fish, with stiff fins that looks as if it’s been made from seaweed. This walking fish wants out, so I oblige it by unlatching the door. It walks and as it walks, it changes.
Whatever force is directing its transformation—which is rapid and whirling—it is a force fixed on its own event horizon, and has nothing to do with me. It passes me and steps outside, moving with determination, away from the bathroom and down the hall.
I walk into the kitchen and, lo and behold, my dead Dad strolls in. He is much younger than he was when he died. His eyebrows are black and sharp, and his green eyes vivid and direct. (He almost never makes guest appearances in my dreams, because he doesn’t believe in this stuff).
I say, complainingly, “Dad! What’s happening?” He directs his sharp gaze on me and he replies, “It’s the Púca. That’s what has caused everything”. I realize he is talking about the large walking fish (and maybe himself, too? this is a question). His alacrity and sharp waggling eyebrows convey some sort of warning, in a light-hearted way.
Does he mean the fish? I think. I thought that was a coelacanth. Welp. Better investigate.
At that, I go outside and find the púca, which has made a shelter for itself under a small grassy knoll in the front yard. It is still fishy-looking, but is starting to look like a young woman, with direct and friendly eyes. We are amiable towards each other, and converse in general pleasantries. I decide to show hospitality to it; to aid it. It is vulnerable and needs things: acknowledgment, food. And wine. Which I brought.
And then my waking mind asserted itself, and asked me to reflect on what it might mean to have one of the “gentry” living in a cave, located on my imaginary front lawn. In my ancestral world, fairies are not things to cozy up to. They have their world and we have ours, and although there is a magical tradition that seeks traverse the two worlds, I myself follow the way of my ancestors and prefer to treat them with, to quote Eddie Lenihan, the great seanchaí of County Clare, with a mixture of “respect, doubt, fear, hesitation, and conviction.” I will always offer hospitality when it is called for, and avoidance when it is wise.
In any case, I woke up. As far as I know, the Púca is still there, lonely, but well-provisioned.
Florence, When I was eight.
When I was eight, my great-Grandmother Florence Cerini Creely, whose portrait hangs in the living room of my apartment, introduced herself to me in a dream and we have been friends ever since.
We met in the South Coast Plaza mall, which had just been built and was not the agonizingly glitzy space it is now. In my dream, I sat on a bench, with my hands in my lap in a posture of waiting patience. The light was soft and bright. Florence walked over to me and sat down. I looked up at her. I saw a kind and gentle lady, who was much older, but in a soft, elegant way: there was no wasting of her bones, no harsh marks of age on her face. Her hair was coiffed and softly white and she was dressed the way women used to dress to go shopping, when they knew they would be seen in public.
I looked up at her, like children look at grandparents, with trust and deference. She spoke to me, and we talked for some time in that bright place. There is no dialogue that I carried back with me, no remembered scrap of information, other than she was Florence, my great-grandmother and she was there specifically to meet me. And that she loved me.
Here is a small, quick story that her son, my grandfather Bunster, swore was true. When he was young, Bunster and his friends liked to jump on freight trains passing through Berkeley and ride on them for short trips throughout Alameda County. He was not supposed to do this. Florence came to him one night as he was going to sleep. “Bunny,” she said. “Your father came to me last night and told me you have been jumping on the trains again. You know you are not supposed to do this.” The rebuke was coming from a dead man: Bunny’s father (my great-grandfather) suffered a major heart attack in May, 1916 and died straightway. Bunny never rode the freight trains again.
Firenze Maria Cerini—her name was Americanized later— my Italian/Irish nonna died in 1950 in Piedmont, CA at the age of 80, fifteen years before I was born. But I have always known her. And this is because she has always been spoken of and remembered with love. Her gentle soul has stayed with us.
This is how I know that this saying is true: what is remembered, lives.
Florence C. Creely with all her children: (from the left bottom) Cerini, Claire, Marion and I think Frank. I’m not sure who the baby is. It might be their baby daughter Antoinette who died. Or it might be Bunster.
October 31, 2016
Oiche Shamhna Shona Daoibh. Happy New Year. Open your doors, light your lanterns and go on a cuaird with your beloved dead. Just remember to come back.
Elizabeth Creely 