“That last sentence of yours is so amazing,” exclaimed Rumi. “Do you often outburst in such a stream-of-consciousness tongue-of-profundity?”
“Never,” replied nfp. “When I speak, I just speak street-talk. All the time. And street-wise, at that. That last sentence—that’s how I write.”
“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” reasoned Rumi, in a quixotic reflection approximating an intimation to perfection.
***
“Well, I could be writing now.” reasoned nfp wordlessly to himself, with a growing, gnawing conviction that Rumi was somewhow correct. Rumi’s words…“So, in that case…you must be writing now ,” echoed and re-echoed in nfp’s immediate consciousness. But if Rumi were correct, and he were merely writing, then she was just his own inner reflection and creation—and not truly the lovely creature he craved to keep him company through and beyond the storm.
In his mind, nfp imagined seeing his fingers striking the keyboard furiously, as obsessed with typing as Narcissus once was with his own reflected image in a pool. And like Narcissus’s forgotten girlfriend Echo, as nfp tendered the prospect of a new composition—perhaps a poem or even a novel, the echo and image of Rumi started to fade, to fade, away…
“But double-fuck that,” concluded nfp suddenly, silently, and with great urgency.
He realized that Rumi seemed to be having a strange effect, indeed, upon him. Her logic, though not pragmatically compelling, was thoroughly suggestive and had led him into this bizarrely lucid, trance-like consideration. He had known seductive women before, but none whose mere words upon hearing induced him to dream at impulse with such an abandon of right reason. Of course, she was real, he firmly concluded. No, no, he was not writing, he was dreaming. Or dreaming and losing it. But losing what?
Well, not losing her, at least.
Finally shaking off this misflight of his imagination and regaining his sense of wider world awareness, he noticed that Rumi was again watching him, much in the manner of how they first met. And he observed that she was smiling at him with a strangely compelling smile, while her eyes were aglow with a friendly, yet piercing fierceness.
“Rapture—I’m captured,” conceded nfp in mock surrender to Rumi’s disarming attention to him. Here under the south-facing overhang of the mausoleum, nfp now drew a little closer to Rumi, to within the cuddle of a breath, both out of attraction to her and to avoid the victimizing wet of the storm still beating down upon them from the north.
“Dreaming alone again were you?” admonished Rumi. “Or writing an unfinished story?”
“How else to dream but cast alone to drift?” rebounded nfp.
“Yes, but in the
nfp was really enjoying Rumi’s reasoning: very zen and employing a sense of multivalency unknown to most classical Western-type thinkers. He decided to play along with the imagery she had invoked, but challenge the premise: “Yet if we are empty boats adrift, dreaming, when we chance meet, what have we to give each other? Would it not be better for us all to load the store of our dream boats with gifts and riches that we might barter and trade, and thus lavish another with the fullness of ourselves?”
“In life, given the confines of consciousness we consensually label ‘reality’, perhaps that’s adequate,” responded Rumi. “Perhaps I need a conscious dose of your romantic sweet-nothings and perhaps you need a bit of my wake-me-up-to-reality angst. Fine. So we trade and then reassess our personal fortunes in the light of that relationship. But in dreaming, the boat imagining itself un-empty is forever a cast-off, a castaway,” continued Rumi, “until it realizes it, too, is dreaming-empty like all else. And has been so since the beginning of time. For only then does the dream cease seeking. And allow what must be, to be”
“Then, from what store do we draw to fill one another with friendship and love, when we chance dream encounter, if we are both truly dreaming empty to begin with?” challenged a faltering twang of Aristotelian logic out of nfp’s mouth.
“There is no store in dreaming. No store at all. That’s the point,” insisted Rumi, firmly yet gently. “It simply invents the moment out of nothing. What is dream love if not being entirely open, empty, and creative with each other? And what is a dream encounter with another if not spontaneously finding the image of the God you worship therein? And if you find the image of the God you mutually worship is Emptiness itself? Zazen.”
“I could do zazen,” thought nfp, “there’s nothing better than zazen in a storm.” And he was about to make a comment to Rumi on the nature of that discipline when a bolt of lightening struck the Dreamland mausoleum directly atop of them and all around. They jumped, in instinctive reaction, into each other’s arms. And, though, at first breathlessly surprised with this storm-arranged intimacy, they both began to laugh. In fact, they fucking howled for several minutes like maniacs. And then, growing suddenly quiet with each other, they tenderly began to explore the emptiness that constituted this dream—two boats coupled, going nowhere, together.
—this is the seventh chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—
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