Fugue States Part I

What Lies In The Interim Of Your Heart?

I first met Constance in a half-dream, in flux from REM to moving through a crowd, from the emblematic to the tangible world outside. I saw her in a vision with the tattoo that I would later tell Cherry about. The warehouse party slowed after 3am, the colors of night pulsed and fought for dawn, her eyes squinted and her full lips mimicked a kiss as she ran her hands through her hair with the tattoo showing vividly under the stacked bracelets falling along her wrist then she was crouched and rocking back and forth in the room where I slept with her arms holding her knees and her face hidden In the darkness of a shadow, then I shined a light and she was gone.

I messaged an herb doctor I visited regularly named Ito Toyokuni. It was 5:00am and I waited for a few anxious minuets for his reply standing at a crosswalk then called "Can I come in without an appointment? I think you owe me remember?" I said referring to some things I had gotten him surreptitiously at an under the counter drug store "Sure, come on up."

I ascended the narrow steps to his live-work studio in Little Tokyo and parted a bead curtain to a room lit with tea light candles. "Early today I see." he said and gave me a spoonful of an amalgam of Blue Lotus and Panax and he tapped the ends of my fingers and studied them peering over the rims of his glasses.

He told me about an experience he had that he thought was relevant. It was about something that happened at his home in Kyoto. He said there was a man in the elevator of the complex where he lived. He slouched with a blank expression and his hair covered his face and there was no elevator number lit. When he got out the man followed behind him and he slid the key card through the slot and closed the door of his apartment as he passed. He said he had a dream that was similar to mine in the way that it was non-experiential and observed from a distance. It was of a mall and the walkway of a promenade with the structural impossibility of an M.C. Escher print and from a bird's eye view he saw that the man had become trapped in the railing of the walkway. He said "When my friend told me she saw the same man roaming the courtyard outside her window I told her about the dream and we found out that he had been diagnosed with cationic schizophrenia and the psychiatric hospital had reported him missing. The psychosis leaves the person immobilized."

"Our subconscious can gather details that we can't pick up on in waking life." He said. "I think if we made concerted efforts in understanding the metaphors of the phenomena of dreams the possibilities would be endless as to what could be utilized."

"What about the physical manifestation of it?"

"Sometimes it carries through to reality. It's called dream residue in Freudian terminology."

Cherry's toes curled underneath her thigh as she sat absorbing the feeling of the fabric of her boucle sofa teetering the edge of her glass on its rolled arms. She was talking about an avant-garde detective show that aired in the nineties that she'd recently seen. "The discussions go all the way back to the era of Usenet Newsgroups. I like the way it's so subjective that it demands the viewer to co-create the meaning." she said and swiped through the photos on my phone like we were the co-creators of my photography content. "Oh, it's Rumi, and that's my time-lapse. You should really try to sell these." I took the phone back and put it in my pocket.

"Oh, come on let me see it!" she complained.

"So what happened with you and Thom?" I asked

"We just drifted I guess. I miss him but, have you read any Rilke?"

"Some"

"The way he talks about love is great. He says that it's not selfishly expecting someone to come along with you on your stupid all-consuming journey, I'm paraphrasing, it's when you protect the solitude of the other, not paraphrasing, Thom never did that with me. What about you and Rumi? I heard you guys were into some freaky dominator shit. She was telling me about it and It turned me on. I was imagining you doing it with that raspy authoritative voice and that body, and it was making me wet. Is it true?"