Skip to main content

Dreamscape: Creative Platypus

Concept art from the Ronald Fairfax novel "The Place of the Skull" currently in the editing process:

Ronald took a great gasp like a man drowning and heaved over onto his side.  The element in the space heater glowed.  Forms of tennis shoes and piled books intruded on the faint line of orange light.  Ronald breathed deep again: in then out, in then out.  God help me.  God let me get some sleep.  I have to sleep.  He’d had nightmares for months after what had happened last December.  Now, they only came intermittently.  He’d been afraid, so afraid, that he’d wake up one night screaming and be unable to stop.  He could scream now –scream and scream- and no one would hear.  Ronald swallowed hard.  He wasn’t going to scream.  He didn’t want to.  It was over.  Deliberately turning away from the light, Ronald pulled the covers over his head and shut his eyes.  Think of something pleasant.  Go to sleep.  He tried to think of something funny, Jack making his strange little finger puppet, Jack pretending to be Goonter, Matt laughing fit to burst, rolling on the floor with hands clenched on his belly and mouth spread wide enough to crack his face, Dan explaining to Mr. Manski that he couldn’t do his geography report on Peru because he found Llama pelts erotically stimulating under certain academic circumstances and his parents had flatly refused to pay for the psychotherapy necessary to remove this deeply entrenched neurosis.
He tried to laugh, but found himself unable.  There was mom in the hospital bed, Dad with that odd look on his face that made Ronald feel embarrassed –like he was intruding.  The books were good.  Books didn’t leave you time to think.  Don’t think.  Don’t think.  Just don’t think.  Sleep is here somewhere.  Why did they have to move?  What was California going to be like?  There was a small apartment and palm trees, lots of palm trees, and that Chinese Theater.  Isn’t there supposed to be a walk or something with handprints?  Karen Sullivan was sitting next to him in the theater, but it was someone else.  The hair was all wrong.  Water was streaming down her face and her eyes were grey.  Go away, just go away.  Cut off shorts and tie-dye and sandy blonde hair.  Not there, not there.  Turn left.  I miss you, I miss you so much.  Anatomy and Physiology would be lab tomorrow.  Test?  No test.  New book in English class and the War of 1812 in History?  Current Events write-up due on Thursday –pick an article.

Something was opening on the edges of his mind that had the shape of sleep.  If only he could sleep.  Who squats on the threshold of sleep and guards the gates of ivory and of horn?  A terror seized him and he jerked awake.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more

The Platypus and Theological Localism

My wife and I were listening the other day to Dr. Fred Sanders give a paper of California Theological Localism.  It was one of the more technical pieces we've heard from him, and it was fun to stretch our brains a little.  If I understand it right, the main idea of Theological Localism is that place matters and will shape the theology of its inhabitants in certain ways.  This could be seen as determinative, or merely as fodder for apologetic engagement, both of which Sanders rejects as insufficient or problematic.  What exactly is wanted seems to be a theological engagement with place, specifically California, in a way that Sanders and company feel has been neglected.  If that's not clear, the fault is mine as a listener or a writer. Of course, the idea of a theology of place caught my attention and my immediate response was "someone should do this for New England."  New England, after all, is its own peculiar place with, by American standards, a long, va...
6 comments
Read more