…World within world the shore and the ocean
are made like our bodies of drops and grains
and the earth is a grain in the ocean of sky…
Because Jeanne and I are drawing and writing pretty steadily, our hold on reality often seems tentative. What are we conjuring and what’s real? On a recent morning she announced, “I had a nightmare last night that Donald Trump was elected president.”
I had a brief dizzy spell: What side of the dream was I on?
“That was no nightmare,” I told her — but then realized that it clearly was. It was 7 a.m., too early for complicated talk, not to mention a martini. The idea that it had been a “real” nightmare gave a flash of hope: We’d wake up and the Donald would be gone.
When I was a student I used to play with the idea that we were all living in somebody else’s dream. If there’s a God, She could dream anything She wanted to. We could be bugs in Her world-sized dream. Besides, everything we do fades into memories, which become more real and less correct as time passes, so our ideas of a fixed reality glide away like lilypads in a stream.
Fanciful, maybe, but the same thing happens when I listen to Trump: His random mixing of truth and falsehood, misstatements and ignorance, misdirections and non sequiturs, strange omissions and weirder additions, half-truths and half-lies throws everyone off balance. What did he just say, and what does it mean? Somehow, this is his strength: The whole world is puzzled, and can’t get a grip.
In this way,Trump’s like a bad poet, relying on indirection, hyperbole (or hyper-bowl, as he might pronounce, making that little circle of certainty with his thumb and forefinger), and straight lies. James Dickey said, “I learned how to write poetry in John Crowe Ransom’s class when he told me I could lie.” Poetry speaks a kind of truth, but isn’t factual. “Tell all the truth/But tell it slant,” Emily Dickinson advised us: “Success in Circuit lies.” Trump uses the “slant” to get away with his “lies.” And uses hyperbole like a hammer. “I’m the least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever met in your entire life!” (This to a Jewish reporter). “I have nothing to do with Russia.” “The fake media — failing NY Times, CNN, NBC, and others — is the enemy of the American people: SICK” (Hey, what about Creative Loafing? We’re sicker than they are!). Every day he pours out statements instantly proved wrong by fact-checking or just playing his own words back to him. No one knows how to handle a President of the United States who denies reality.
Last week, the sober-sided Republican pundit David Brooks jumped into this post-modern chaos by asserting that “[t]his is no longer a country in which everybody experiences the same reality.” Trump’s comfortable in this realm because he knows that his base doesn’t care. He can grope the media the way he gropes women, disrespect judges the way he disrespects blacks. Many Republicans don’t approve, but his loud core supporters love him because of what he is, not what he does or says. He’s an angry, misogynistic racist, and the crowds shaking the auditoriums chant with him, KICK THEM OUT! LOCK HER UP! This is what’s happened to the American dream. To these people, watching TV — mostly Fox News— 2,000 hours a year, making America great again won’t have much to do with blacks or women.
As an artist and poet, Jeanne and I are used to dream worlds, but now we’re surprised at the company. We agree: it’s not the same dream anymore.
…and the sky is a drop in the bloodstream of God
and the drops in our bloodstreams are moved by the motion
that makes all the rivers that run in God’s brain
—both quotes from “World Within World” in Trying to Surprise God by Peter Meinke (U. of Pittsburgh Press 1981)
This article appears in Mar 2-9, 2017.