City of Endless Dance

“Reality is a blank screen upon which we all…project.” Suzie Bluesday is coming unglued. Fingers fall and there’s no one to catch them. They just drop into the black silk night, little stars of fading human anatomy. “It’s really very simple,” the professor fish drones on, purple gills seething with colored bubbles. Each bubble is a thought, a message. They drift playfully around her, popping just before her face like a flash, and she is fully enveloped in a simulated world. “First we must understand the nature of omnipotence: know that there are no rules, but the very existence of self-imposed rules declares that those self-imposed rules never be broken. It would throw the whole thing off. Rock the boat right into the water. Take golf. Golf is the simplest, but most agonizing, example. It illustrates perfectly my thought and yet we must, for a moment, pretend that anyone likes it. So. Golf. The object of golf is to put a little white ball into a little hole in the ground. Now, anyone can tell you, the quickest way to accomplish this would be to simply pick up the balls, carry them to the holes, and drop them in. That we must tap the balls with sticks to do this is the only thing that makes golf challenging, or interesting, or even golf. The challenge is the inherent nature of the game, do you see?” Suzie nodded, but the fish professor wasn’t interested in her reply anyway. It went on,

“Reality is, like golf, a game of general consensus. You don’t remember signing up for it, of course, but that too is one of the agreed upon rules. As some particle physicists (not the type who appear in New Age books or films beginning with the word “Quantum,” those are simply intolerable will not do at all) believe, reality is determined by consciousness, although not exactly in the way that has been portrayed or hoped upon. Rather, reality is not determined by consciousness alone, but the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, or with matter, and so on. It is the relationships that count. Say we wish to fly without need of mechanical means. That is the change we wish to impose upon the universe. First of all, we would have to find others who share our belief, or we would get nowhere. No change can be done alone. Secondly, we would need to study the atmosphere of our planet, the skies, the weather, and, more than mere study, come to know them. It would be necessary to befriend the clouds, to court the skies. The consummation of our love with the skies would be had at the moment we achieved a perfect relationship with each other, with our skies, with our knowledge of each other and our skies. This would come in a flash of insight--we would invent a chemical or some such thing that, when swallowed, imbued us with the power of wingless flight. Thus, our desire manifest and no rules are broken.” The professor fish nodded, his lavender cap almost drifting off his smooth skull completely. “God works in mysterious ways. It is the only option available.”

We’ve come to a singing city. The red reed boat snaps against black coal shores, and I shake the sleep and dream out of my head, thank the fish man for the ride, and approach the city. Singing cities always make foreign travelers uncomfortable. To time your step just right, to twirl or skip or spin at just the right moment, to even know which dance is appropriate takes time, practice, and intimate knowledge of the city. This is a slow, wailing city, and we waltz here through this empty age. Gilbert is waiting, static eyes set to a dead channel. “Baby with TV eyes, says anything you’d like to hear, but only lies,” I greet him with lyric in synch to the city’s mournful song. “Colored lady from the underworld,” a smile breaks across his thin, brown lips, teeth the color of familiar jars, lined into perfection, “Used to be a dream before she was a girl. Haven’t seen her face, not since Tuesday. No, you never can keep track of Ms. Bluesday.”

We spoke carefully (everything sung in a dancing city becomes true) of business in lyric, and I left with a slight melancholy, and a prophecy leaf. On the ferry ride back to the shores you know, I held the thing in my hand, turned it over, reading lines like poetry, thinking about what the fisherman said so long ago. And anyway, the cat survived. You left the world for dreams, and I wonder what it is you found. I saw you singing along a river bank, a dummy playing a bamboo flute, and an Italian inventor with thin eyebrows touches my shoulder and tells me, “This is the first carving.” The first carving of many. She is always hungry. Viavore.