stranger in a strange land

Summer returns: the garden plants glow pale green in the direct rays of the sun. A butterfly flops wildly among them.

Another day of no writing--not even morning notes, since I spent my coffee-time writing down a dream I'd had. I took half a Sleep Aid last night, and as often happens the drug provoked vivid dreams. What the heck, maybe I'll just transcribe it here: a trip even deeper into the mind of the writer:

Walking with Warren along Columbia Street, south toward Pender. We’re wearing dark suits, and he’s in a dark trenchcoat. It’s Sunday and we’re about to attend a Jewish class at a yeshiva on Pender. We may walk arm in arm, crossing Pender Street amid the smells and run-down awfulness of the Downtown East Side-will we be accosted by crooks or drug dealers before we get to our destination? There are also piles of gravel and other signs of construction on Pender, especially to the west, toward downtown.

But we head east, into Chinatown, where the Jewish center is (something like the Chinese community center in that area). It’s in an old building with its door right on the narrow sidewalk. With some trepidation we head in-will we be accepted, since we’re not Jewish?

Inside the door Jewish kids are playing, running around, having fun before they have to knuckle down and go to class. They’re all in respectful dark clothes, and all the boys (they’re almost all boys) are wearing yarmulkes. I see that Warren too is wearing one, and am suddenly gripped with alarm that I don’t have one. How could I have overlooked this? And why would Warren have a yarmulke? I think he must have attended Jewish funerals long ago, maybe when he was a kid, and he still has this.

All I have is a yellow-and-black check scarf. I suppose I can somehow put this over my head, but I don’t think there’s any way of doing so without looking like a woman. I’m afraid of making myself stick out this way when I’m trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. It’s probably too much to hope that they have some spare yarmulkes for cases like me--no one here would forget his. I handle the scarf nervously.

I wonder where the class will be--we’ll be studying orthodox Jewish teachings, maybe kabbalism. There is a corridor running down the old building, and, I see, large open stairs leading down to a well-lit basement floor, like a mall. Dark-dressed Jews are going here and there, solemnly, with purpose.

A little Jewish girl, smiling and friendly, dressed more brightly than the boys, says hello and tells me where the class will be. I feel a little more at home--they do accept outsiders here.

I reflect on how alien this environment is, and yet they’re human beings just like me. I think about being among actual aliens, extraterrestrials, all the civilizations that may exist in the universe, and what it would be like to be among them. I shudder to think of it, how utterly alone I would be. And yet they are sentient beings, like me; I could get used to it--wouldn’t it be better than being alone on a lifeless planet? Yes, this bustling Jewish center could be a spaceport on another planet. I’ll wear a headscarf like a woman and perhaps be laughed at, but they won’t turn me away.

When I write down dreams I also, if I have time, attempt an interpretation. I take the dream as I've written it and go at it phrase by phrase, teasing out meaning in various ways, mainly by using the Jungian technique called amplification, in which each element is restated in objective terms, like a dictionary definition. The first bit of my interpretation I did thus:

Walking with Warren: a friend and partner, one who knows me best. We have created together. If he’s a shadow-figure, then he’s a friendly and accessible aspect of the shadow.

along Columbia Street: Downtown East Side, run-down, dangerous, depressing. Hookers, addicts, drug-dealers. Why Columbia? I know it best: have used it as a corridor home from Mom’s place in False Creek. In this block, between Hastings and Pender, I used to go to the Green Door, a favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. Chinatown. (Parapraxis: I typed "Greed Door" instead of "Green Door" just now.) A place of derelicts, crooks, losers.

And so on. I didn't finish.

I wanted to write it down because I've never had a dream like it before. It reminded me of when I was in Jerusalem in 1981. A fellow guest at the rooming-house where I was staying, Ira from Staten Island, felt almost persecuted when he went out because someone at a yeshiva was trying to recruit him to take classes. Ira would skulk through the streets of the Old City, trying to stay under the radar of the yeshiva press gang. I found it funny.

When I told Effi, a local girl I went out with a couple of times, that I was interested in the Jewish spiritual teachings, she suggested that I should go to a yeshiva.

"What, they'd take me? A gentile?"

"Yes! They'd love to have you."

I never went. I didn't want to convert, but mainly I wasn't planning to stay that long.

The dream seems to be suggesting that in going into my project, my research into the deep past of Christianity and its roots, will change my sense of identity. My work has a lot to do with the theme of identity. I'm a stranger in a strange land.