The Strangest Dream

 -- By Tom Phillips 

 Picasso: Guernica

Vaccinated at last, on the eve of Easter I flew masked across America, not looking out the window, not talking to my neighbor, and arrived in Seattle to meet our new granddaughter, already nine months old.  My sleeping meds disappeared enroute, probably somewhere "in security." I went to bed, prepared for the worst.  And I dreamed:  

Forty years, forty years.  The phrase kept echoing in my head, an anvil chorus, an indictment, a sentence imposed by a merciless court.  There was music, a vicious descending line that came down like a hammer, repeat, repeat.  And I saw men taking sledgehammers to a nursery, to the place where their children play, bringing down their hammerheads to pulverize everything, to turn it into trash, shards, the ruins of a civilization.  

I awoke in horror. Trained to see people in dreams as fragments of myself, I thought -- can this be?  My meds were repressing a wrecker of all I supposedly love? 

But no, most of me was a bystander, one who watched for forty years as men took sledgehammers to a civilization -- destroying the world that had been a-building, the world meant for their children and grandchildren.  

I had dreamed the Reagan Revolution.   

Viral Spring #12: Life in Stir

   -- By Tom Phillips

In 2011, a 59-year-old North Carolina man held up a bank, then waited for police to come and arrest him.  He was sick, uninsured, and wanted to go to prison to get health care.  Here in New York, many young black men say prison is the only place they've ever eaten regular meals.

Prison offers educational opportunities and a chance to make long-lasting friendships. It also gives you freedom to think and create.  Many authors have found inspiration behind bars -- from Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet to Eldridge Cleaver and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  And Martin Luther King  made his most profound and moving plea for racial justice in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  

Not to romanticize incarceration; it's a drag at best, violent and life-threatening at worst.  Boredom and rumination are your worst enemies -- with little to do in present time, you can get hung upside down in the past.  It takes discipline to stay in the present, and not think about the future -- i.e. when will this be over?  It ain't over 'til it's over.

 But now that we're all under house arrest, those of us who have our own living space should count our blessings.

Plaque near Thoreau's cabin site, Concord MA  

Chief among them is the radical simplification of life.  Work has dried up, travel is out of the question, restaurants and bars are closed, meat is scarce, parties are banned, money sits in wallets with nowhere to go.

In a way our souls have transmigrated to an earlier America: e.g.Walden Pond in the 1850s.  Like Henry David Thoreau, we sit in our cabins, alone or with a lone companion, contemplating ourselves.  And like Thoreau's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, we must rely on ourselves.