Dreamed 1983/10/23 by Chris Wayan
I'm in San Francisco, at the entrance to a park called Stern Grove. I walk through eucalyptus woods to the green lip of the steep vale, and lift off, skimming birdly down the near-cliffs to the winding meadow along the bottom--the fairground where we picnicked when I was small.
But it's all crumbled to dusty ruin, except a pedestal, fore, with a wrought-iron Griffin, couchant, and a half-built steel structure rusting red, behind. And beyond lies, not the City, not the sea, but desert.
The wind rises round me, and on the pedestal these words appear:
Just girders and dustExcept... it's not quite true. It's more complex than that. The girders aren't a ruin, but a construction site. Colorful murals hide in corners. A half-built museum? People stand in lines. A couple kisses in the shadows.
Where childhood was.
And as I hike on, into the desert dunes, I see a well. Oh, a burly man hiking out of the dunes tells me it's a failure: "You only get two gallons an hour from it. Not enough to supply a single house." But he's a wasteful American and he's wrong, that's plenty for me. Plenty to live a good life in this vast, beautiful solitude. Near the museum too!
And the griffin was real. I doubted it, they told me I imagined it... but the griffin's real.
NOTES IN THE MORNING
Griffin in town = a magical hybrid in a totally incongruous environment--just like me, a shaman with psychic dreams growing up in suburbia. They taught me gifts and vulnerabilities like mine aren't real. They were as wrong about people like me as they were about women, nonwhites, gays. Rather than grow up and out of my difference, it endures like iron, amid the ruin of so much else from my childhood... and the mess of building a new me in the desert.
There are echoes of Shelley's poem OZYMANDIAS here. But he wrote of a proud king's statue that deep time brought down. My dreamself never fell. Mute, lonely, rusted... it endured.
But my soul's not human--not even half, like the Sphinx who inspired Shelley--and never was.
My soul's a Gryphon.
Get used to it, Wayan, get used to it.
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