A note of the realistic surreal dedicated to my local church’s paradox
There are nights and there are nights.
There are many different nights and these nights bear their diverse hues.
Some nights are easygoing nights. You get draped with dusk and the depth of darkness deepens and deepens. Such easygoing nights are to save the mind and body from exertion. In no time, your subconscious becomes a flapping butterfly ushered into dreams or delving into dreams of its accord. In your dream, you can be a friend meeting an age long friend who is alive or just a fine folk eating a warm meal. These dreams are lightsome and are not ropes tugging on the skin of your future or the significance of your past. Otherwise, yours is a lightsome night sans dreams.
Some nights are roads. Roads lobed with insights. Just like you have all day, you ponder long on your progressive outcome requiring endeavor. Your endeavor may be a research matter of mind boggling bouts as quantum physics, an artistic piece of absolving creativity, algorithms or just any quintessential matter of such progressive outcome seeking class. You wear exhaustion from your times of pondering. You’re awake or you to go sleep. But such distinct nights are lobed with insights, such that if you go to sleep, you’ll dream or dream dreams. Within your dream(s), you’ll find a window opening with moving matter motioning towards you. Within these same dreams, your motioning matter can be dews downing on you, a stream of bright light or a representation of the enigmatic that translates to your getting drenched with raindrops of insights. Months later, when your toddler calls you to speak of your breakthrough, you understand its art and science, and the logical brink of its art and science. But you chose the succinct route and with a smile you say:
“I go to sleep. I dream. I see windows. And the world applauds me.”
Not as an appraisal. But some nights are for the wicked and are roped on the machinations of these mischievous folks. These nights are hinged on the sojourn of gory spirits and the flight of witches. These nights are ominous nights of travel to huts nested in the heart of heinous forests. Of commuting spirits gathering within the wild waters of the world; walking backwards into the hardness of impossible rocks; reclining to lounges in the trunk of thick trees with shady tops carrying man-eating vultures breathing the countenance of cruelty. The processes of such nights and its gatherings may be mysterious but as a consequence, a folk elsewhere is a recipient of dreadful dreams.
So that there are nights of dreadful dreams. Of a dreaming man – wasted and barely clothed in his dreams – getting flogged and chased into a dark forest by evil masquerades. These nights are nights of gruesome transitions, of say a celebrated sprinter cloaked with lameness. Say of a sane man suddenly roaming the boulevards of insanity. Say of a healthy lass hit with an illness bypassing the intervention of medicine and worsening until labeled ‘terminal’. Say of a nursing mother wailing from her dream and waking up to the lifeless body of her infant. These nights are nefarious and hasten a man’s forceful transit, say from his dreams to his demise.
Some nights are spent on white hills and forests of prayers. These nights are nights of invisible wars and surreal collisions. They are to stone prayers with slings, to unbutton delusions, and untie knots. When a man becomes a recipient of this night, his glaucoma growls, and then vanishes. When the day breaks, this man’s bewitchment is gone and so he sees clearly. His insight returns and he gets reinstated to the class and honor he previously owns. When a spinster becomes a recipient of this night, it ends her long list of fled lovers. She finds a soul mate that does not flee from being flustered by the fingers of the daunting surreal. Her lover stays and she ties the knot and owns a home.
Some nights are nights of visions. A prophet or anyone of the surreal community stands as a seer. He may be white garmented or not, but it doesn't hold weight. What matters is that his spiritual eyes are lit torches piercing through layers of heavens and dimensions. In these nights, a prophet stands as a seer. His eyes are torches lighting dark subways of the spirit. When his vision hits instances of significance in time, his vision is affixed and secrets plunged in the deep of the undiscoverable are uncovered. His gift is given by the creator and knows no bounds. When asked how he sees the invisible and what companionship with the immaterial feels like, he says:
“God caused me to walk on waters and made me so”
Now over here, because we are chartered after the order of the inexplicable, we are here and there. That is, we laugh and sonnet here bodily but didact melodies in the incorporeal. But some nights, there is neither melody nor laughter and we just are flustered folks tugging at the brink of realms. We are whole cities on fire, drawing a brother's soul from his demise. I recall my mother in one corner; sizzling in unfathomable frequencies and beckoning to the brother's soul to wear the jacket of his bones, blood, and skin once again. But his body is badly wounded and the imminent dawn is drooling floods of his departure. So the rope of our pull snaps and when we lose him to the yonder, we become tearful folks grieving past here and into our spirits.
And on other sore nights, when there is no demise, we are jacketed with sad memories of the past and so we wear our distinct hue of blue. In our mind's eye, we take a headcount of our lost ones. We are painstaking and we account for the texture of their demise. Of electric currents trooping through our brother's body until his demise. He is a sweet husband and a caring father and we love him. Of a vehicle speeding off the road to crush our sister to her death. She is a loving mother and a caring wife and we love her. The death toll numbers on and on and often these happenings make us unhappy.
Yet, on this side of our enigma, where we're circumfused by the infallible surreal, we are calm as ripples on a quiet and lonely river. We are consoled by the posture and substance of the ethereal. We are a flux of rich, educated, poor and lay-folks. Yet, regardless of our seeming divergences, we all would wager our livelihoods on the certainty of meeting of our loved but deceased ones someday. These loved but deceased ones of ours are over there at home on the other side of the river. They are waiting for us betwixt cherubims and in their glistening cloaks of the surreal. So someday when these long detours are all over on this side of our enigma, we would step into the canoe and paddle home.
