[How is it that I never posted this? It's a personal favorite of mine, from 1992 shortly before I moved from LA to SF for what I thought was my last move. A. was talking about his dreams today and I thought of it.]
My room grows larger, and daily there is less in it, but it only becomes more beautiful: when small rugs fade and vanish one by one, the bright bare wood floor can be seen, echoing the differently grained walls of the many bookcases.
The various small light sources, floor lamps, swiveling and jointed, vanish gradually, fading into bright motes in the constantly expanding alcoves, although the light remains general, diffused, shifting slightly in hue from gold to green and back. In the large central space, there is only a vast woven rug, its contrasting webs proliferating and transforming themselves, the deep nap comfortable to lie down on while turning the pages of some large volume. Only the bookcases themselves seem to become more numerous, not multiplying, but more of them are gradually seen as vision clarifies and fogs fall away, exhausted.
The books: they become larger and more themselves, the prices and publisher’s names mature and simplify into formal and meaningless signs, the titles grow deep into the spines until they cannot help but be read, even from yards away. They are clear sometimes, or sometimes clearly ambiguous. The things within the books are growing, developing like ancient images in silver nitrate, becoming more truly what they are. The grief and sorrow of a small book bound in Prussian blue cloth purifies itself, flows more cleanly and more according to its real nature, and when the book is opened the shriveled impedimenta of mere characters and place descriptions fall from it like dead, dried silverfish. Or the terrible dark red book, large and expensively bound, which I keep on a high shelf, the violence of whose events becomes more imaginative and crueler with time, so that I can only peer momentarily into its pages and then quickly withdraw, sickened and amazed.
Perhaps most remarkably: when people die, the books about them suddenly become heavier, more solid and precise. Indices appear, events and meetings recast themselves in sharper relief: now it is clear what was important, what was part of the plot, as opposed to things that just happened. The chapters of these books arrange themselves into definite sections: juvenilia, mature life, last words. In several of the books, minor characters (and, in some cases, major ones) have names that are like mine. If I read one some days or weeks later, I realize I am not certain if there are differences: hasn’t the character become more distinct? One thin, dove-gray volume with carefully artistic lettering has a photograph of a man that gradually changes: the mustache, the cut of the cheekbones, begin to look more and more like my own.
Sometimes hot, dirty winds blow through the open windows, pushing volumes off the shelves and covering them with grime. The largest books remain undisturbed, although I become frenzied, rushing to keep the riffling pages from harm, fighting through clouds of dust to reach the windows and slam them shut. The glass shivers, and I hope that it won’t break and leave the shelves unprotected from that which is outside. Sitting then, brushing my fingers across the heavy, soft paper of a square white volume, or wiping off the bindings of small books for children, with their familiar, brightly colored adventures.
The large rug will finally fade and vanish, leaving only the bright grain of the floor, but not yet: and when that happens many of the books themselves will be gone, having finished with the mere concreteness of covers and pages. Only the biggest and strongest of the books, those that last through many lives, will stand here and there on the shelves, so heavy and so vivid.
I want to read the book of the sun. I want to open its heavy brass covers, my eyes naked, unprotected, and look.
[Los Angeles, 3/17-4/19/92]