Dream Exception

It’s Saturday. I just finished up my first week contracting for Seven, the event-booking platform. That’s less important than the dream I had this past week.

I was looking at a Gothic wooden sculpture of the Lamentation of Christ: Mary holding Jesus, doubled over in sorrow, Jesus slumped and lifeless. I would use the expression “blew me away,” but it did quite the opposite; it drew me in, deeply.

In form the sculpture resembled much of what is on display at the Met Cloisters. Yet there was a metaphor behind it which I could not access.

If there were a tour guide there, she might have told me, “Well, you see, this is a metaphor for the pain of all women who have lost their sons; and not to limit ourselves to those sons who have been lost in a literal way, to death, but also to age, to independence, to treacherous and unknown life circumstances. And through the pain on display here we renew our understanding of his importance, his goodness which was too much for this world. Reflecting this sanctity was the goal of all Gothic sculptors of this school...” and so on back down from the Heavens to the wood this tour guide would go on and on, talking around the point.

No, I was not content with these explanations; I wanted to go deeper or else drown. Who was Jesus? Who the sculptor? Who the lumberjack? Who the planter of the tree? Who the creator of the seed? Who caused the seed to fall in just the right way to germinate? And who inspired the sculptor? Who gave him the motivation to finish his half-chiseled trunk? Who told him the work was finished, that he should not whittle it all down to nothing?

Who?

At some point my questions began to transcend the spoken or written word; the languages of math and physics come closer to being able to express these questions. Why is division into 0 groups impossible? Why cannot matter be destroyed? Why does infinity exist, and why are we only able to grasp at this concept but not possess it? Why does simple recursion produce patterns so dense and complex that some hidden rule seems to have governed their creation?

On and on the questions go, up and down the ladder of abstraction, but also horizontally across all fields of inquiry, and in imaginary space, too, where directions take on different meanings, where the most convoluted path may be the shortest, and where the concept, the question, and the answer blur together.

At this moment of blurring, of lightness and darkness that coexist and are the same; at this moment of loudest din being so imperceptibly quiet, whispered; at this moment when organization and chaos were found to be inseparable; at this moment when I was elated and disgusted at everything I saw, heard, smelt, felt, and was; at this moment I was told “NO!” I was kicked out of the infinite chain of metaphor and could go no deeper.

I woke up to Sydney screaming in my face. Apparently she’d had a nightmare.

Photos: “Compianto sul Cristo morto,” Niccolò dell'Arca (1435-1494). Italy Magazine.