He, the old wanderer, had found a lost continent.
He dreamed of a new world.
And she had gotten into it, so long that she had been coming and going from him, that she had forgotten who it had been.
But he often muttered – who could he have been listening to – “Too many people around, too indifferent, self-absorbed.”
And so I write about this old man, brief as he is, a homeless man I met, and I will fill in the gaps in his life, which was more his dream world than what we consider reality.
For the old tramp, his dream became a reality for him.
The more he dreamed, the more it became enraged realism.
Outside of this world of dreams, the world for him was ugly and disgusting.
“Where the truth was, it was what people wanted it to be at one point, and it was never fully revealed,” he muttered.
“And the simulation was worshiped, like Baal,” he murmured.
Consequently, in this kind of hazy dream life, he found a new world in which he could live, day and night.
Disassociated with earthly existence, his struggle for survival, continuation, as his other world grew more real, deeper, and deeper.
When he was awake, what he ate was for the most part, what he encountered, which rarely happened, during those last well-intentioned and forgotten days: that was: garbage thrown out the open windows of city apartment buildings!
His mind was made up of thoughts and fantasies.
His waking life was a life of images in the brain, he preferred the inner dream.
It was as if something were shackling him.
…
In his alternate world there were enchanted hills, gardens that grew flowers that looked as red and bright as the sun, blinding sapphires, mountains that sang to the moon, whispering seas, cabins with roofs of bronze and gold.
And himself, he rode a harnessed white horse, crossing sculpted bridges, white paths, watching the birds, bees and butterflies swarming the fields around him, in a placid way.
Through the cedar forests, he leapt with his horse past the ivory doors of the huts and municipalities with high vaulted towers.
Always trying not to wake up, or if he did, to drink more wine or his choice of drug, whatever he could find, to supplement his habit of returning to REM sleep, and delving into the world of hashish, for a more eloquent episode, one for which he was born, and to come out of the other in which he was thrown.
One in which he preferred to exist was not the one in which he was born.
If he had been woken up, all he saw was a terrible dawn from a stagnant, ruined city, a creek full of muddy garbage filled with reeds and vermin!
People stared out their windows, choking on carbon dioxide from passing cars and trucks.
Furthermore, he knew that he would quickly tire of the rawness of people’s emotions and similarity, and they would never understand the meaning of his life.
And then, once in reality, the full, clean and sober reality, where would the satisfaction or fulfillment come from?
What he had left in the past, in his gallant dream country.
Wasn’t this in itself the antidote?
The old popular doctrines, the inflexible cures, most of the cures were muddled thoughts.
He wanted to escape, or find a match, like Gilgamesh who sought out Enkidu, out of boredom.
Nobody took the time to find out the secret wells of his life, the ones that described him, he had a room for each one, hung in aspirated colors.
And then one day, out of nowhere, there was a crack, an abyss appeared, a crack opened, like an earthquake, in the deep recesses of your dreams!
He fell down, down, way down into her abyss.
And there was his greatest achievement, he found it, the Radiant City of Crystals and Pearls. “This,” he whispered, “is where I’ll stay and live, it’s where I belong!”
This magical world so vivid, once in fragments now all together, his mind’s associations fell into sight, a breathless expectation, one that was insatiable.
…
He felt a tug on his shoulder, it looked like a python was trying to get him out of town.
“No, no” he yelled, but no one heard him.
The old woman tried with all her effort to wake up the Old Tramp, lying on a damp mattress thrown away like garbage and full of ants, ticks and white bugs and worms, in a vacant lot, inside the big city, a metropolis.
Lo, then a policeman approached, took his pulse, he was not sure.
He took a long, long look to move, at the old hobo lying!
She even patted him on the face to wake him up.
But the old man was warm, feeling the calm of the sea with a breeze, watching the clouds float over a cliff in the village (in the land of fantasy).
One of several curious strangers who had huddled around this inert body said with a loud cry, “Someone, please take him to the hospital!” although the right to backtrack was reserved.
Then the police officer announced that he was dead.
Tell the old woman who had beckoned him: “I’ve seen him here before, he was a dreamer, a drunkard, a drug addict; although he did discover something about all this,” and hesitated to say what he thought, while the old woman waited patiently to hear final comments, “calm and enduring beauty only comes in dreams … what the real world threw away a long time ago!”
For those seductive moments, the old tramp was observing the region where the sea meets the sky.
He refused to allow the python to wake him up or the insects to slap his face.
And all those who at that moment knew what had happened, wherever, they also continued on their way, wherever.
# 5286/18 / 6-2016
