Mesquite Thicket


I had a dream in which I was showing my wife the place where I came of age. I had dreamed a few nights earlier of this house, more indirectly. I was looking at a house with a mesquite thicket behind it, and I told whoever was there with me (I am peeling away the detail, which in someone else’s dream is tedious): “I really like mesquite thickets.”

The mesquite thicket was behind the house, inside which there was a single bathroom often with the door locked and inside an athlete at batting practice. The mesquite thicket was a private world, full of hidden places, and thus full of secrets.

As I showed this place to my wife, the line between the back yard and the thicket had changed. There was a road along the property line, now planted with oak trees. We drove past an old oak with a really big trunk and a flowering of branches and leaves. “Look.” I pointed to show Linda that the tree was filled with singing birds.

The rest of the dream is vague but I think the tree transformed into a man. The perspective at the end was from a house across a cultivated field, to the west, where in reality a girl had lived whom I fantasized about. She wore short skirts, and in class I would put my head on my desk and artfully frame her legs just at the skirt line, so that I could imagine that she was naked. At least she was as far as I could see. I don't recall what was being taught in the class, but I was studying art.

So there was a kind of triangulation of family, mesquite thicket, and anima projection. But about the birds ... they belong to the realm of spirit. I recall Marlon Brando, in "The Fugitive Kind," doing a soliloquy about a bird that flies above the earth in the thin atmosphere, with transparent wings so that it is invisible to predators, and this bird never comes to earth until it dies.

There are also stories about birds gathering on the roof of a house when there is an impeding death.

Recently I was listening to a Neil Gaeman audio book. Anansi Boys. It is about Charlie and Spider Nancy, who are brothers but don't know each other. Spider was sent away, banished, when they were very young, and now, with the death of the father, they are brought together again.

In Gaeman’s book, Charlie makes a deal with a mysterious bird woman to get rid of Spider, because Spider has seduced his fiancee and turned his life upside down. The bird woman is in the service of Tiger, who wants to control the stories, making them once again into the brutal existence of instinctual drives of power and submission, predator and prey. It is the archetype of the spider which prevents Tiger from taking power. The spider is the storyteller, with magical powers.

It felt like a positive, life affirming thing to see the birds in the tree; after all, there’s no reason to point out to another something you don’t think’s worth sharing. On the other hand it might have been a symbol for a bird brain ...

Spider has magical powers which come in handy when the birds come after him and Fat Charlie. Spider is able to move from one place to another just ahead of the birds. If they go to the poles of the earth here come penguins and if they go to London here come the sparrows. They at one point end up in the shaft of a salt mine in Poland. Spider is at one time even attacked by suicidal flamingos intent on smothering him.

The birds are sent not to kill, but to deliver Spider into the hands of Tiger. If shadow is not owned, then it can fall into the service of the dark side. Birds can be negative emotion. Or they can be positive emotion. It depends on to whom they are in service. They can be harbingers of death, or they can rock in the treetop all day long, hopping and bopping and singing their song. In Gaeman’s book, Spider finally takes Fat Charlie back to jail, where he’s in on suspicion of murder, to keep him safe from the birds.

Being in jail is being trapped by rules and conformity.

The idea of being imprisoned brings to mind the story about the miller’s three sons, each choosing a path. The one who goes to the right ends up imprisoned by his father for conspiracy. The one who goes to the left ends up captured, via trap door, under the whore’s bed. The one who has to take the middle road, the road of certain death, has his horse die, but it is reborn by magic the following morning.

The centrist comes to a meadow in which there is a round hut revolving on chicken feet, and inside it a witch, and she says “Tell me young man, did you begin this journey voluntarily or involuntarily?”

He says, “Fix me some food and don’t bother me with stupid questions; I’m a hero on a journey.”





Posted: Mon - July 7, 2008 at 04:43 PM