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We Who Don’t Venture Beyond The Supraliminal

As an adolescent I would awake in the nadir of the night to find odd notions not my own pressed into the cheek of my mouth; alone in the umbra of my sleep, when the stars hanging in the New Mexico nights would blink like countless lambent eyes, a silent diplomat of Mareritt would come into my bed, tilt my head up with the first three fingers of one hand and open my jaw with the thumb of the other. Into my mouth would go this notion, and many others with successive nights. Each was a bitter chant, a drumbeat of questions that would not brook rejection.

One morning over breakfast, my grandmother told me that the haunting of ideas has dogged the women of our family since the reign of Eric III, when an unwed mother steeled a dagger with the blood of a loon and thrust it into the gut of our oldest patriarch, sending his sons into the past and his misfortune into the future. Ideas, she said, are deaf to the words of mercy and grief—one can only yield to them, as the forest does a fire. This story is one of those notions, perhaps the oldest and the bitterest, its narrative skeins returning to me in the night to weave sails that catch not on the wind, but on the breaths of the mind.