3 - A Soul Left to Wander
Nov. 15th, 2013 03:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayA few nights ago, I walked through the attic of my grandparents' white, asbestos-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road. In the many years since they last lived there, in the many years since I'd last seen it, it had been cleared of all the familiar things that once resided there.
Inside the house I felt oddly disoriented, unsure of how to get, from where I'd entered, up to the attic which I remembered from my childhood. Afterwards, I recalled that there'd been two sets of stairs, one from the front of the house and one from the hallway off the kitchen, which met at a landing, and then a second shorter flight which led to the floor above.
In the second floor hallway there was a door and, behind it, a few more steps up into the attic. Once there, I knew I should have found, hanging on a makeshift rod below the rafters, my uncle's Army Air Forces jacket, brought home from his wartime tour as a B-29 propeller mechanic in the Philippines.
Maybe it wasn't that I'd forgotten how to get there. Maybe it was simply that, in the inexplicable manner of dreams, I'd actually gotten there without traversing the vaguely-remembered hallways and stairs. Even more perplexing, once there, was the absence of the dark and rough-sawn rafters overhead, the soaring ridge boards and plunging valleys, the dormer rafters angling into them, that I remembered.
Instead, it was a sterile and empty place with straight, gray hallways lined with rows of closed and locked doors, much like those storage spaces that people rent when what they've come to, in their present lives, is somehow out of sync with where they've been.
And I wondered afterward if all of this was shown to me as a way of saying that, because of how I'd lived my own life, what I'd hoped to find was now irrevocably gone, the space it once occupied now empty and gray, like a life long lost and a soul left to wander among the sterile tombs...
LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (c)
Inside the house I felt oddly disoriented, unsure of how to get, from where I'd entered, up to the attic which I remembered from my childhood. Afterwards, I recalled that there'd been two sets of stairs, one from the front of the house and one from the hallway off the kitchen, which met at a landing, and then a second shorter flight which led to the floor above.
In the second floor hallway there was a door and, behind it, a few more steps up into the attic. Once there, I knew I should have found, hanging on a makeshift rod below the rafters, my uncle's Army Air Forces jacket, brought home from his wartime tour as a B-29 propeller mechanic in the Philippines.
Maybe it wasn't that I'd forgotten how to get there. Maybe it was simply that, in the inexplicable manner of dreams, I'd actually gotten there without traversing the vaguely-remembered hallways and stairs. Even more perplexing, once there, was the absence of the dark and rough-sawn rafters overhead, the soaring ridge boards and plunging valleys, the dormer rafters angling into them, that I remembered.
Instead, it was a sterile and empty place with straight, gray hallways lined with rows of closed and locked doors, much like those storage spaces that people rent when what they've come to, in their present lives, is somehow out of sync with where they've been.
And I wondered afterward if all of this was shown to me as a way of saying that, because of how I'd lived my own life, what I'd hoped to find was now irrevocably gone, the space it once occupied now empty and gray, like a life long lost and a soul left to wander among the sterile tombs...
LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (c)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-08 09:08 pm (UTC)It's understandable that this would be difficult to accurately translate. (I think it's probably true that the more subtle the writer tries to be, the more difficult it is to translate.) But a key to understanding the writer's purpose in speaking to us from a dream is the reference to the soapbox racer as a "time machine."
In a way, our memories and dreams are also "time machines" which take us to places, people, and events that we can no longer reach by ordinary means. And our dreams have a way of warping reality to perhaps reveal meanings contained by those same people, places, and events which we might not have realized, or been willing to confront, in our waking lives.
Thank you for commenting and for being interested enough to seek clarification. I hope this helps...