Hear/Say

As of late, I have been determinedly preoccupied in the world of Murakami.
Where dreams run as parallel realities, where mere curiosity and quiet, romantic observations recolor the world to form frighteningly symbolic circles of meaning…

When I read Nabokov or Keruoac or Baudelaire or Fitzgerald, the reality they portray is entirely anchored in the objective reality we feel in the norm. The Normal, the Un-Other, the less-than-extraordinary is conveyed to us as a story of extraordinary events. Sequences of narratives, emotions, etc. (flying across the forsaken lands between the east and west coasts, falling in love with the freedom of unrequited love, the filth of living and our visceral existences climaxing then rotting) are journeys in which the reader may watch through sentences unscrambled with meaning… they remain distant tales, Disney characters who we will never make love to, or could barely feel anything for but customary twinges of sympathy (even then, these spasms cease at the ring of a dinner bell).

Yet when I read Murakami, I find an altogether astonishing surreal truth of existence.
Within the very mundane is the magic of hypersensitive detail… The fabric of how I feel in my very environment is stretched and ripped. The bowels of what normal reality I once felt as a numb being are spilled out, pulsing, gleaming, semi functioning but slowly, surely, twitching in the death of the chaos I have recently found myself in. What consistent reality I once trusted has committed a delicious seppuku. I feel a crippling childlike uncertainty, the suspension in any belief hanging my conviction by tenterhooks wound up on a high, cold ceiling in an cavernous warehouse.

These are melodramatic observations, perhaps encouraged by the sheer volume of pages I have voraciously consumed these past two weeks. But I feel the same threads of fate in my life this year that Murakami has so eloquently and keenly committed to his millions of copies of books… The eerie swells of conflicting selves. Of dreams birthing dangerous premonitions that have spilled into my waking reality, even going so far as to affect my relationships in subtle but significant ways.

I’ve always been wary of the vivid nature of my dreams, careful not to trust each whimsical event as evidence for viable desires, wishes, or fears. But emotions are emotions, whether or not your eyes are awake to differentiate the reality in sunlight or the dark night. I have always experienced a heavy, affective residue after my vivid dreams. I cannot ignore them because the grow stronger.

This last one had the power of returning me to life before I met you, when things were emptier, lighter, more free. When I awoke in the morning, I felt less for you. But I also felt less of myself. The retrospectively serious nature of what happened in my dream may directly lend significance to these feelings, but I remember a strange, shallow joy in the experience.

Ironically (? Depending at how you look at it) this makes it easier.