Just Between Us

In the dream, I sit in front of a large painting of two irregular rectangular shapes. The painting was begun by someone else and appears to have been abandoned. The shape on the left is a reddish mauve. The one on the right is a cerulean blue, lighter than the form on the right. And on its inside edge is a swipe of white that has picked up the blue underneath.

I keep looking at the space between the forms and this interesting edge, until I feel nearly ready to resume work on the painting.

When I look again, I see that a student has painted over the rectangular shapes with burnt umber and yellow ochre. The top part of the canvas is full of a loopy script.

I see that she’s working very fast, moving from this painting to two smaller canvases and back again.

I’m shocked and disappointed.

I had wanted to go into the painting and work on it myself, but it was her painting all along.

I want to tell her to slow down, sit back, and look for a while.

I ask her to imagine a story about a woman and a painting or a narrative from the painting’s point of view. I invite her to write several versions and discover what happens in each.

A musical word, like belladonna. Beguiling and as full of deadly potential.

Flu is the thing we hope to avoid each winter, and whose vaccine we either get or don’t depending upon our opinions.

Shot or no shot, it can infect us—carried by the air we breathe, the objects we touch, the hands we shake.

It is ubiquitous. Like fear. With a mind and life of its own.

And despite my best intentions and massive doses of Vitamin C, it takes me down in January. Stealthily at first. And then with real insistence, it grabs me like a thief and hisses, “Don’t mess with me.”

I’ve heard it can last from three to six weeks—lingering. It can turn into whooping cough or pneumonia. It claims lives.

So I cancel everything that will require my leaving the house for two weeks, including a business trip back East.

And I go back to bed. I surrender to days of fevered delirium, fitful sleep, and waking dreams—nightmares mostly—of my life in various stages of collapse.

The flu as metaphor.

The flu as signifier.

The flu bearing news that I can hear in no other way.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Is that it?

Last year, Nadeem Abdel-Gawad was preparing to graduate from the American University in Cairo. He was also about to return to Tahrir Square for the first anniversary of Egypt’s revolution.

“Either we succeed, or they will have to kill us," he said at the time.

Clearly, Abdel-Gawad is still alive. What’s not so clear is the state of the revolution.

“A lot of people are kind of lost,” he says today. “I happen to be one of them.

"Things are not as clear as before. The battle doesn’t seem to be the bad people vs. the good people. All we’re sure of and all we know is that many have been killed, and we don’t see anyone being convicted for these crimes. It doesn’t make sense. It’s a huge step after 18 days of idealism [of the revolution in 2011] that you’d have to face a reality where the collective consciousness did not grasp the whole transformation.”

The mood in Cairo today

A friend says she’s relieved that the world is going to end on Friday; at least she won’t have to deal with Christmas.

More optimistic folk insist the world isn’t going to actually end, just the world as we know it because the earth will slide through a portal into a new dimension.

“Without Christmas?” asks my friend, brightening somewhat.

No matter where we find ourselves at the end of the Mayan Calendar, chances are we’ll be muddling through Christmas again this year.

And whatever else Christmas is or isn’t, it remains a mystery, coming, as it does, at the darkest time of the year—at least in our part of the world.

At Winter Solstice, we are pulled inward toward stillness, sleep and dreaming. At the same time, the energy of Sagittarius compels us outward toward new adventures and a quest for truth. And in all this sturm und drang comes the Christian celebration of birth, incarnation, and the union of human and the divine.

Never mind the end-of-year inventory and bookkeeping in preparation for the tax collectors.

No wonder everybody goes crazy.