Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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The following assortment of notes,
musings, proposals for future consideration, lists, and quotations is by
design doubly open: exposed to the reader, but also subject to revision,
expansion, excision in a way that a traditional written journal (or even
a blog) is not.
The Drowned Train Long ago I had a dream* that I was hiking alone in a Vermont forest, working my way down a long, rocky hillside. It might have been a clear, dry day — I don't remember — but I couldn't see far ahead of me because the forest was so dense. Finally I came to the bottom of the slope, where there was a clearing and sunlight, and as I emerged I saw that I had come upon a railway cutting that ran across the bottom of the hill, though there was no road or settlement or anything else to be seen nearby. There was a train on the track, but it wasn't moving; it was stalled, caught by a flash flood, perhaps from a stream swollen from snowmelt or rain higher up in the mountains. It was a passenger train, with a half dozen or so identical gray cars, all of them inundated nearly to the roof. The detrained passengers — there were no casualties, apparently — stood quietly on the grass banks on either side, waiting for rescue or for the now still waters to recede. That's all there was to it, or at least, that's as much as I could ever retrieve. A train and a flood, two fairly unambiguous symbols. One representing a journey, a vector, but here annihilated by the other, its nemesis, the perfect embodiment of entropy and oblivion, the water from which, according to Thales, all things are derived — and to which they must in time return. My part in all this was only as witness; it wasn't my train, after all. Many years later, I went to see Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, Spirited Away. The movie's story is too involved to summarize here (and you should see Spirited Away for yourself, in any case), but briefly it concerns a young girl, Chihiro, who accidentally crosses into a city populated entirely by spirits and is unable to return. (Her parents, who have also trespassed, are turned into swine.) Chihiro finds shelter and menial employment in a spirit bathhouse that is under the sway of a sorceress, YuBaba; among those who help protect her is a boy named Haku — he is sometimes a dragon — who is YuBaba's unwilling henchman. Late in the film YuBaba's sister and bitter rival, Zeniba, comes to the bathhouse, seeking the return of a magical seal that Haku had stolen from her. She leaves, but not before transforming Bo, YuBaba's enormous (and enormously spoiled) infant, into a mouse, and the Yu-Bird, one of YuBaba's spies, into a small winged creature that in The Art of Spirited Away is called Fly Bird. Haku, in the meantime, has been badly injured —while in his dragon form — by a flock of paper birds sent by Zeniba. Hoping to save Haku, Chihiro resolves to find Zeniba and assuage her wrath by returning the seal. Zeniba lives some distance from the city, across the sea, in an isolated cottage in a place called Swamp Bottom. There is only one way to get there: by train. But this train is unusual: its tracks lie just below the surface of the waves, and its stations and whistle stops are surrounded by water.** (We are also told that it only travels in one direction.)  Chihiro, in the company of the now much-tamed Bo and Fly Bird, and trailed by the curious character known as No-Face (long story), wades out to the landing to await the train. The sequence that follows is the most beautiful in the film; Miyazaki is a master of the long, quiet, meditative moment, and the mood is underlined effectively by Joe Hisaishi's gentle music. The train glides through shallow, calm waters, with Chihiro waiting quietly inside. There is a little gentle comic relief as Bo and Fly Bird, now just two innocent children, display their excitement and enjoyment of the ride. Otherwise, the train carriage is almost empty; there are just a few hunched-over, heavy-set human forms, at once indistinguishably dark and partly transparent. Now and then the train slows and one or two of these shades disembark; a few others can be seen lingering along the route. After a while the scene is interrupted, as the film cuts back to the bathhouse and YuBaba's discovery that Bo has vanished; when it returns the train is just pulling into dry land at Swamp Bottom. And the story goes on from there (Zeniba, as it turns out, is not frightening sorceress she had previously seemed, but a kindly old granny).
I once posed to a group of Miyazaki fans the possibility that the train journey represented a visit to the land of the dead (one-way, after all), but the consensus then, with which I tend to agree, was that it was more likely a passage to a land of traditional animism, one that human beings have lost connection with (it's an idea that is very Japanese — and very Miyazaki). But the strength of the train sequence is that it remains, in the end, resolutely enigmatic — I don't know what it means, only that it is haunting and wonderful. And I can't help thinking that there is some affinity, some harmony of symbols, between my dream and that part of the film. There are obvious differences: the train I dreamed was stalled and largely submerged, while Miyazaki's skims confidently and effortlessly to its destination. But maybe the difference is only one of degree — or of time. The quiet, looming waters are the same, but in Spirited Away they are more benevolent, for now. *”Tell a dream, lose a reader.” (Lawrence Sanders?) The moment a dream is “told,” of course — or even recalled — it is no longer a dream but something quite different. Contaminated by self-censorship, conscious intentions, shadings, it ceases to be a “pure” product of the unconscious; in short, it becomes literature. But then are we sure that the dream itself is immune from the same infection? Or, vice versa, that the “intentional” is not under the sway of the unconscious? Of course we are not sure. There is a parallel dichotomy between speech and writing, the latter supposedly the dead shell of the former's living presence of the former — see Lévi-Strauss and Derrida. Or see George Williams, The Radical Reformation, on the debate between Biblical literalists and those early Anabaptists who believed that the scriptures were only the ”outer word” of God, something much less trustworthy than the ”inner word” received through personal communion with the Spirit. ** Interestingly, there was at least one train with submerged tracks in Britain, the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Tramroad. October 24, 2005 Update (April 2007): More on “The Drowned Train”
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