A Procession of Colorful Turtles (Part Four of Four)

I too believe that Paris’s reading about the nastiness of yester-year supplied an impetus for the expression of an emotionally complicated dream. But when Paris did the reading, he was also pondering the attributes of his invention, Jean Ami, a character whose lachrymose sensibilities are comparable to his own. Thus, a deeper statement about the poet’s inner world seems to have been made, as its particulars may establish a metaphor for the anguish the soul experiences in a harsh and demoralizing physical reality. Does not Jean gain something of anagogic value in his capture of the pig, only to lose it as he tries to help his brother to his feet? Are not his better angels slandered by the brother he tries to help? Indeed, is not Jean-Paul condemned for merely taking in the swirling images that symbolize the loss of something good? Paris contends that the experience of seeing evil can cause us to believe that we are a part of it. But more of that in the pages to come.

 

For now, it is better to think of the boys as Christian truth-seekers, ones whose success or failure is determined by their ability to reconcile the precepts of their faith with what they actually experience. However, such efforts often amount to a fool’s errand, since even when the object of a quest is within reach, a truth-seeker is conflicted by the incongruity that exists between his fealty to a physically non-existent realm and his willingness to test the integrity of that relationship against the crucible of a small, and physically flawed intellect. Thus, any insight he gains is, at least in part, relegated to the status of an inscrutable oddity or bizarre exception to the rule that can serve only as an impetus to continue asking the same question. Whether he wrestles with the constraints of orthodoxy or the abstruse complexities of mysticism, his efforts tend to engender only a more nuanced rewording of the question he seeks to answer. Like the crowd in Edgar Allan Poe's, "The Conqueror Worm," he pursues a phantom that leads him in circles[1] to the “self-same spot” of his original suspicion because the question is, in essence, the answer.

 

In this way, the truth seeker imperfectly fishes

For the crocodiles that are occasionally

More beautiful than monsters.

 

This is so because the truth seeker is reluctant to embrace

What he has not already deemed to be a part of reality,

And he knows that anything that is taken

Into the unique realm of his beliefs

Has the potential to undo him. 

 

I am so happy to have placed these thoughts in your mind and hope you will remember that all of us are comprised of other beings. Dreams are difficult to understand because the task involves the mind (a phenomenon of the physical world) communicating with the soul (an autonomous and immaterial entity), with the two having little (if any) ability to understand who or what the other is. Thus, the Question: Who Dreamed the Dream?[2]

 

 

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[1] “That motley drama �" oh, to be sure / It shall not be forgot! / With its phantom chased for ever more / By a crowd that seize it not, /Through a circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot / And much of Madness, and more of Sin, / And Horror the soul of the plot.

 

Poe’s assertion that the repetitive “horror” of human existence is more the product of sin than madness is an astounding proposition for an agnostic to make. Perhaps, he means that the horror of human existence has more to do with our nature than what we experience.

 

[2] Jean Ami agonizes over the nature of dreams in “Beyond the Ruins” (Page 262), comparing dreamlife to a snake-like river that goes “unknown to heart and mind, to faith and wisest eye.” Camille Du Monde speaks similarly about the subject in the entry that follows that poem, concluding that “No man can say with certainty to whom a dream belongs.” Indeed, even the contemplation of a dream is discouraged in “Slanders of Eternity” (next page), with the poet suggesting that dreams merely mock our existence.”

 

The subject of dreams is explored in other sections of Pilgrim Heart, particularly in “The Loud Uproar of Heaven,” but also in several poems contained in Paris’s Third and Sixth Decorations. Curiously, Hlad eschews the subject entirely in the concluding pages of his work, making no mention of them in “The Confession of James the Friar,” “The Epistle of St. Dominic,” or even in “The Petition of Baptiste De Guerre.”