# [D17:29M] Vision: [[Heaven’s Revolution 29 Mandalas]] Hexagram: [[Seventeenth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Seventeenth Trial]] Symbols: #twentynine #moon #bed #stomach #sun #red #black #night #house #doll #mouth #hands #smile #lightning #phonebooth #eye #canyon #coyote #child #bat #daughter #cave #black #blood #tree #door #six-four #dog #twin #ten #blue #winter #brotherearth #airplane #brotherheaven #mother #father #yellow #fourty-six November 22nd, 1963 1. It was a dream of 29 circles lasting 29 days. A blood moon hung over the towns in the twinkling distance of the low western plains.   In the dream, I couldn’t sleep.  I had gone to bed with a stomach ache. 2.   I had been aware of a parade that was to occur in the scorch of an endless day. It wasn’t quite morning yet, but, in the dream, I could see a little into the future.   I could see chrome wheels of Cadillacs, the sun reflecting in the glass.  Ghostly red  tail lights.  Ghostly because nothing is ghosltier than a bright hot day.   Ghostly woman bleached in pink reaching desparately backward  out of a shining black convertible.   3. Foreseeing the morning unlocked a secret  floral heart about the aromatic darkness.  Queen of Night,  hanging from an orchid cactus, glowed pale as it bloomed  and dulled as it wilted.  That was another circle,  the flower’s center.  Two of them, actually.  Two flowers.   One circle beneath the other.  Heaven and its reflection.   A dream of a life. 4. imagine a porcelain boy  his head is a sphere and he appears like someone  who has vanished from your life  5. like all disappearing things  he is living  in the fable now   6. the boys who once lived here when these railroads  and the river marked a town took turns  kissing him and then buried him under the porch   the bank came and took the house  and the doll was left underground for a hundred years  the house was from a dream  every house is psyche every doll  is a frozen memory and every memory of kissing  is a recurring ache for completion 7. Someone thinking of something he didn’t like looked down over the ship’s deck  at the flat weird ocean without a swell, just a low round surface ripple  as though something might emerge.  He had a feeling and then a craving.  8. He dangled from his thumb and fingertips a cold sweating glass  of something that had a little circular orange slice in it and pressed  the hand-same palm against the taffrail for balance and coughed. 9.    Then he unveiled with his other hand a Velvet tin from his shirt pocket.   His hands were full now, and he didn’t know what to do with it all, so he balanced with both palms on the rail and dangled his objects high over the abyss and looked around himself.   His mouth made a shape like the water, for no visible thing was in it.   10. The question of what to do with the hands, that’s a big one. How to differentiate between performance  and ceremony. How to hold the dark  glass.  How to cease begging  for what would only shatter in your grip. 11. The tiny old man is smiling.  He once said,  “If all else fails, try smiling in the dark.”   Someone might wonder what there is to smile at  in the dark.  They might not realize the archaic  nature of the smile.  The archaic nature of smile returning archaic smile. 12. The dry lightning and the crack of thunder above the black arroyos. It will seem sudden.  The after-image  of the stricken ground will linger in the eye like a bright hovering thing  before an encircling dark, and disappear. Keep watch.  It is already happening  again — one night after a day’s defeat, noting the waste of your life, there at the end  of the driveway as you take the garbage out —  the same flash as before, but this time the electric trail flips upward and loops around itself.   It will not happen again.  It will last forever. 13. I don’t know what’s on the cassette.  Once, I saw a recording of an empty room, and, by watching, I myself was watched.   What should I suspect I’ll find on this now,  if not my own life surveilled and going faintly  along?  No one showing up. 14. I would like to know how many working phone booths remain here.   Heaven, for me, is finding just one, far from any road, in a dark wood,  on a moonless night.  I see its distant light in that outer darkness, bright as an angel from another time.   Putting the receiver to my ear, I would like to hear nothing  but the clear true statement of the dial tone. Whomever I should dial, tell them I was happy here  and not to worry. 15. If you should begin to cry, you might look at yourself  in the mirror.  You might find yourself unsure about the reality  of your devastation.  Not its facts but its glamour.   That is, your devastation might seem somewhat other  than devastation.  Something foreign hovers in the middle  distance, doesn’t it,  between yourself and it.   Between your nose and the glass.   A wise woman once said to me, “try to feel sad without actually being sad.” I did try.  I tried to feel sad.  The tears kept coming anyhow. 16. It is hard to tell sometimes what we’re even talking about.  Are we better off believing, beneath this low August moon,  that our present location is a deep magnificent arroyo or more  of a harmless little canyon?  You can hear those coyotes  going on and on about it all night down there. They don’t seem to realize, those uproarious midnight children, that most everything tends, as a rule of thumb, to appear  precisely as one requires, which is, you know,  the very reason for the madness.  17. Generally, I want to get the gloves off the moment I’m done.   Here and there, paint sneaks in underneath.   I don’t know how it happens, but it’s good enough evidence  to suggest there’s no real protection from such sloppy media.  You take the gloves off and wash the hands, quick  as you can, before anyone should notice.  The only thing worse  than toxic substances getting under the skin  is other people’s opinions about it. 18. There might be nothing better than a bat.   A flying bat, not a wooden club, with wings  for fingers and a cute vicious little face.   I will sometimes hear them flitting about the canyon.  I will take my little daughter into their cave.   She, in her black pajamas with printed-on belt,  pretends to be a ninja, while I do my best Bruce Wayne.   Lacking a Batman suit, I can only act rich  and pleased with myself and root her on  as she knifehands and roundhouses at all  the squeaking voices in the dark.   19. In the dream, the doctor is washing  his hands in the sink and a telephone  is ringing from some awful place. 20. I cannot see the phone from where I lie, here  in the doctor’s bed.  But I listen well to the infinite  ring.  It must be the shrill cry of a far caller. 21. The doctor is thinking to himself, I am  a caring person.  The blood is still draining  from my nostrils.  The sink is nearly as loud. 22. I fell asleep in the afternoon heat beneath a cork bark and a juniper  and woke up burdened and bothered. I’d dreamt of my air conditioner,  of its gagging and moaning.  In the old days, you didn’t need air  conditioning, but now the earth spun in reverse.  Now was the time  of the mini split.  I watched with my mind’s eye as a sultry little  such-and-such strode perkily though the woods just as new and timeless  as the first story ever told.  A thick low adobe with little windows  among the distant pines watched me watching.  I didn’t imagine her;  she simply was imagined.  Who can say who lived out here.      23. Only now, getting to my feet, did I see that the tree I’d slept against  gushed with its own sap, and the sun was falling down behind it now,  even now, even this high, and at this hour, in this transductive  conspiracy against me, of wilderness, machine, and dream.   No hermit sage of old would retreat to an air conditioner, but sit,  rather, in the open desert heat down below, in back of the house, say,  with his wrinkled old face thrust out toward the condenser fan blasting  hotly into his slack-jawed total acceptance.  He would know what  heat is for.  The withstanding of all else. 24.   But not us, we aren’t the sages of this land, are we, but frustrated  teenagers prowling about for forest nymphs, prying open the plastic  outdoor grate when the technology fails and we’re hot and confused,  and the AC is choking its last choke, and we’re wondering how  we’re ever going to fix this mess, calling someone up  with the proper HVAC credentials, appealing to any authority  on the matter, us saying, here, take the keys, and the dude  in the coveralls looking down at the key we slapped in his hand,  saying, I don’t think this does what you think it does. 25. It was night and I fell asleep at the wheel and someone I once knew  slept too, in the back seat, and leaned so hard against the door  that he tumbled all the way out and across the road, one whole half  of him turned to charcoal and dust.  He cursed me down as he  skimmed and thunked and summersaulted all along the street,  but I was too tired, much too tired, to catch what it was he’d said. I remember him very much like a brother, almost a twin to myself.   He hadn’t any manners was the general problem with him,  and he vexed so very many of the most ordinary and unassuming people,  at weddings and baseball games and parties and so on, making such  a general nuisance of himself that he was systematically uninvited  to one after another event as the years wore on. The way in which he did this might have been clever if it hadn’t been  so pointless.  For example, he was careful enough never to say a sexist thing  to a woman at a party, yet everything he said to any woman at all was tinged  with some kind of tone.  If he said to the girl holding the cookies on a little  paper plate, “where did you find those cookies,” invariably she heard,  “where did you find those cookies?”  Because that’s what he said.  26. His brilliance was in understanding that cookies, all by themselves, were almost but not quite entendres, near-insinuations, practically right out  of the oven.  If such a gal were to situate, for example, her cookies adjacently  to her carrots and hummus, my friend, having already asked about those cookies,  might well follow up with—and this was the true source of his regional fame— something like, “Do you always eat your cookies before your vegetables?”   Which, as stated in a previous stanza, for we seem to be using stanzas here,  is not itself sexist.  Yet there’s something in his very need to know more  about her unorthodox snack sequence, which, yes, somehow, just beneath  the surface of things, is sexist.  She knew it just as well as any within earshot  that there was something vaguely rapist about it.  Me?  I was rolling in  the crushed Doritos on the floor.  You couldn’t stop me laughing. That was, until he did the trick on me one night, a sort of reversal of the usual, for which he was equal in talent.  Perhaps I’d upset him somehow.  Perhaps  he was just bored.  Boredom was often sufficient to turn him smart and cruel.   It was a gallery opening and I expressed a critical opinion about a painting  made by a black painter.  “Easy for you to say,” he said.  “Look at you.”  Fool  that I was, I doubled down. “What? If you’re black you’re automatically good?”  27. Here came the coup de grâce.  All that was necessary was for him to take one  languid step back.  No rebuttal necessary.  He was tall, my friend, I’d say six-four.   That backward stride was like that of the most lugubrious big-boned flamingo  ever recorded in its natural habitat.  It strode 400 years into the past and stomped  out my family tree in a single backpedal.  And so it was.  My galleries dropped me.   My publishing contract was canceled.  My wife left me and took the dog.   For the next ten years, my friend and I didn’t speak. I changed my name and moved  away.  I met new people.  Went to new parties.  Got remarried.  Reproduced.   That was okay, but no one ever laughed anymore, not in the new place.  Everywhere  I went, everyone’s giggles had gone.  If I tried to remember the last time I heard  laughter, it was back then at that gallery opening, my twin’s.  He’d had the literal last laugh.  His brilliance was in playing it both ways, to stand, at once, on the left and right of you. As for how, ten years gone, he got into my car, it’s difficult to say.  We all of us know  by now, don’t we, that we’ve been long ensnared in the dreams of others, swept away by the current of anxiety and night terrors.  When I reflect on it now, it occurs to me I might have been dishonest.  It might not be that he self-ejected out the back  while I sleep-drove.  It might be that I pushed him out.  Through the window is  the procession of a world’s somnambulant monsters, the lot of us, and in the rearview.  28. One childhood brother drifted up to Heaven and one stayed on Earth.   The color of Heaven is blue.  There, the clear water mirrors the clear sky.  A stopwatch was set.  It measured the stages of the vanishing of things.   The brother remaining on Earth came to be hidden away from himself  and so was hidden from the world.  He tried, at first, to resist  the vanishing.  If he had a word to say to someone, he’d whisper it  a second time because he wasn’t sure he’d really said it.  He wasn’t sure  a thing could be said.  He wasn’t sure a thing was said, and was there  really anyone who’d said it.  He could not locate himself somehow,  and sometimes he could not locate others.  The stopwatch counted down.   On the way up to Heaven, if you try speaking to your family,  it is unlikely they’ll hear you.  Yet, for the one left behind, the odds  are hardly better.  It’s common for a family to go blind and deaf  after one among them, especially a child, has gone to Heaven.   Blindness becomes preferable because it is not a permanent darkness,  but a permanent past, which is frozen like a winter lake reflecting  the same old images.  Not silence they hear but the TV, the telephone,  the ding of the microwave.  Brother Earth tried hard not to vanish.   He made elaborate drawings and wrote make-believe dialogues  with imagined others.  He would keep his sight even if he couldn’t  locate himself.  He informed the Earth of his plans to stay.  “See me,”  he said.  “See me.”  But the more he said it, the less She saw. Still, he stayed.  He would lie on his back on the trampoline looking up  into Heaven.  A plane might fly past overhead.  He wondered whether it was near or far.  Nearer to or farther from what?  He wondered, when he saw the plane, if it existed inside his eyes, in his seeing of it,  or if it existed behind seeing, not in a sky, but tacked to a colorless field  not yet named.  Gray paper toy.  Grey paper table.  He knew never to ask  his questions.  He knew as well as anyone how useless they were. He was often given over to fantasies he didn’t question.  Brother Heaven  flew around up there, like a superhero, great immortal, possessor of powers.   What Brother Heaven had, Brother Earth had too, even if hidden away.   Brother Earth could fly.  Brother Earth knew magic.  But the deal on Earth is,  the moment one reveals his gifts is the moment they vanish.  He will  be seen as one who is not actually there, and if that happens too often,  he comes to believe it. 29.  As a child, Brother Earth sometimes visited Brother Heaven’s grave  with the family.  The living siblings would feed the pond’s ducks from bags  of popcorn while mother and father cried.  There were geese and swans  there too, and a little farther off, some fenced deer.  The family moved away,  and the grave went unvisited for twenty years. The stopwatch kept its count. Heaven was still blue, though who could say?  The cemetery was bigger than he remembered, not smaller.  He was alone now. He could not remember  where Brother Heaven’s gravestone should be.  He searched blindly for signs.   There was a little footbridge on one side of a duck pond.  A thing in his skull  dropped down to his stomach and his legs lifted up.  His pace quickened  over the bridge.  Absent of any thought, his legs raced out in front and pulled.   His jog became a sprint past rows of stone markers and yellow and orange  flowers.  He was on his knees and his face was wet and he knew the name  on the stone, for it had brought him here.  Steady was the stopwatch.   Another twenty on top of twenty passed.  Brother Earth neared his 46th year.   He’d married twice.  With his second wife, he was given a daughter  who was five now.  In each new year, in each of his mind’s eyes, his little  Brother Heaven had grown alongside her, new, revealed, and returned to Earth.   It had been his secret, all these years, to have glimpsed Brother Heaven here  and there, long before his daughter’s birth, in the mountains, in shopping malls,  at night time, once in the early morning fog.  Sometimes, Brother Earth cried  when it happened.  Other times, he simply smiled and said hello.  Meeting  Brother Heaven in this way, from time to time, seemed to slow the vanishing.   He’d taken, finally, Brother Earth did, to sitting alone outside and keeping quiet.   With his wife and daughter, they moved out to the desert and there he rested  for a time.  Many times, he’d wanted to be finished with Earth, wanted Heaven  instead, like his brother had.  But with his daughter he formed a contract to stay,  and with no new ideas, fell on his butt and sat where he was.  Brother Earth had so feared the vanishing over the years, that he hadn’t noticed how vain  it had made him.  He was ashamed of how self-superior he’d allowed his loneliness  to make him.  Yet, from one day to the next, there was forgiveness in his heart  and he lowered himself in prayer.  He sought those who came before him,  those whose memories shifted around in the mud of the Earth.  And he saw that the Earth sees too, and hears just as well, that Her memory is long.   He learned many things from Her.  Stillness and kindness.  He began to whisper  only what he heard Her say first.  She would say a secret word; the broken thirst  of his voice repeated.  He heard the words come out of his mouth but did not know  who’d said them.  The words were strange and repetitious. It wasn’t the point that they confirm him, but deny.  What sounds at first like denial in the ears of the surrendered becomes a welcoming.  For he had always known the voice was not his.  To speak the right words was to vanish into that Other, to let Earth  remain with Earth and thus belong to Heaven.  He could not prevent the vanishing. It was happening even now.  For the more he vanished, the better he lived. Brother Heaven looked down at Brother Earth through the eyes of the daughter.   She was almost 46 now, and frail old Brother Earth lay in bed.  Brother Heaven  held his stopwatch.  Its circular face showed the number 29 and had long ago  been set to 30.  One more second to go.  “Almost,” said Brother Heaven.  “Almost,”  said Brother Earth.  And it was good. .