If she could find the missing fragment of the dream in the daylight she might reconstruct the entire tapestry. She was seeking a window she had seen in a dream. She was walking through the city at night, looking for the window, and she found it. It was the window of a house open on two avenues. In the dream it was the window of Proust’s house. It was also the window of a house she had lived in, she could not remember wheity at nt she was certain that she had already known the feeling of standing at this window looking down at the two avenues like opened legs. She was certain that she had stood many times hesitating between these two avenues. Her route constantly split in two, the whole structure of her life constantly splitting open into two sections. The nature of her mind running like a double river. She could never make a choice. She would follow the avenues until the pain of being thus quartered became ecstasy and the two avenues fused together into a point of absolute sorrow. The drama was this window opening on the dual aspect of existence, on its dual face. The drama was this window she had seen in a dream, which was the window of Proust’s house when he was writing the endless book in which he made no choice, but followed the contours of the symphony and the labyrinth of remembrance. She had chosen as an answer to the dream this pursuit of the dream without memory. Yet she left behind her a ribbon of memory which wove itself inexorably and slowed up her walking and dreaming. But while she followed the dream she was free.
At some point the pattern of her life hung like a frayed cloth and the street of dreams turned into blackness.
That is why she left certain places in great precipitation. She was following a dream. She was in a hurry. When she entered certain rooms filled with people she had never seen in the dream, she became instantly aware that THIS WAS NOT THE PLACE. The need of flight was imperative, compulsive.
When she found the place, she sat very still and satisfied. She sat in a trance remembering the dream and seeking to recapture the lost pieces. She had caught her dream. Or her nightmare. Caught up with it. Then it seemed to her that all the clocks in the world chimed in unison, for the hour of the miracle. As the clocks chimed at midnight for Cinderella, for all metamorphoses. The dream was synchronized. The miracle was accomplished. All the clocks chimed midnight for the metamorphosis. It was not time they chimed for, but the catching up, catching up with the dream. The dream had a way of always running ahead of one. To catch up with it, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle. The life on the stage, the life of the legend dovetailed with the daylight, and out of this marriage sparked the great birds of divinity, the eternal moments.
When the dream fell to one side, wounded, and the daytime into another, what appeared through the cracks was the real death. The crack of daylight between the curtains, the slit between night and day was the mortal moment, for it killed the dream. The soul then lost its power to breathe, lost its space.
Nights when she awaited the dream, as one awaits the ship that is to take one far away, and the nightmare came in its place, then she knew she had something to expiate. The nightmare was the messenger of guilt. The nightmare brought her whatever suffering she had rejected or eluded during the day, or given to others. The dream was the refuge which permitted her endless voyages; the nightmare imprisoned and tortured her.
Now it was not altogether the dream, nor was it daylight. It was the place where many of the effects were due to shadow, to silences and to space. A marvellous mise en scene, such as human beings knew nothing of when they awakened. It was the moment when one was more than awake, a million times awake, awake backwards and forwards, with a circular fever faster than the rotation of earth, awake with a million eyes and a mouth that had said everything and was now struck with silence; a place so high that breathing ceased and divination began.
It was the twilight of mercury.
The room was turning black. She was splitting herself into two women, and she felt the half of her that was standing up and the half of her that was lying down.
It was here that everything happened to her. The daytime was only a sketch. In the daytime all the gestures were thickened by obstacles, by remembrance. Only in the dream was the loved one wholly possessed, only in the dream was there ecstasy without death. Life only began behind the curtain of closed eyelashes.
The woman who walked erect during the day and the woman who breathed and walked and swam during the night were not the same. The woman who breathed and walked during the day was like a cathedral spire and the opening into her being was a secret. It was inaccessible like the tip of the most labyrinthian sea shell.
But with the night came the openness.
The day body made of rigid bones, made rigid with fears and dissonances, was set against yielding. At night it changed substance, form and texture. With the night came fluidity. With the night there ran through the marrows not only blood which could always commingle with other bloods, but a mercury which ran in all directions, swift, mordant, uncontrollable, spilling and running in star points, changing shape at each breath of desire, spilling and dispersing without separating.
With the night came SPACE. No crowded city. The dream was never crowded. It was filtered through the prism of creation. The pressure of time ceased. Joy lasted longer and suffering less, or else all the feelings were telescoped into a second. Time was arranged and ordained by feeling. Fear was eternal, anger immediate and catastrophic. Sifted and enveloped in a mineral glow, each object of the eternal landscape appeared on the scene with space around it. The space was like an enormous silence in which there was no sword of thought, no rending comments, no thread ever cut. She walked among symbols and silence.
She ceased to be a woman. The secret small pores of the being began to breathe a life like that of plant and flower. She went to sleep a human being and awakened with the nervous sensibility of a leaf, with the fin knowledge of fish, with the hardness of a coral, with the sulphurous eyes of a mineral. She awakened with new finger tips, new tendrils, new wings, new legs, leaves, branches. She awakened with eyes at the end of long arms that floated everywhere and with eyes on the soles of her feet. She awakened in strands of angel hair with lungs of cocoon milk.
With the night came a multiplied breathing and new cells like honeycombs filled with a strange activity. Filling and refilling with white tides and red currents, with echoes and fever. Cells, beehives of feelings, inundated with new forms of life dissolving the outline of the body. All forms became blurred and the woman who was lying there slowly turned into a heavy sea, carrying riches on her breast, or became earth with many fissures of thirst, drinking rain.
With the night came the boat. This boat she was pushing with all her strength becase it could not float, it was passing through land. It was chokingly struggling to pass along the streets, it could not find its way to the ocean. It was pushed along the streets of the city, touching the walls of houses, and she was pushing it against the resistance of earth, of cobblestones, of sand, of lava. So many nights against the obstacles of mud, marshes, garden paths through which the boat labored painfully.
She was not altogether asleep. The night was like a very black silk curtain, but there was still a slit of daylight. She felt the approach of the dream. But while there was a slit of daylight there were words floating around her. They were sharp, they cut like knives into the feelings, they separated, they scalped, they uncovered the skin, they exposed, they killed the feelings. The moment words cut into the dream, into the feeling, they cut into the pulse and the pulse ceased to beat. The slit of daylight was made of steel.
The boat was passing through the city, unable to find the ocean that transmitted its life voyages.