Raw Footage dream-tipped memoir

By William Michael Philion

If dream is memory, then the written dream is memoir. So the author believes, at least, as he invites you to join a guided tour of his own dreams, narrated by his subconscious mind. One by one, these short bursts will tell the story of the author—who he’s been, who he is and even how he must die, for that is also part of memory. This is a looking-glass world that features jarring dreamscapes, such as an island where fat banana haikus grow on trees; a tea garden in Japan where he is overmatched in a bone-crushing judo contest; an autumnal glade where a spinning necktie quilt wants to shred him; a perfect tree that sheds dew into his eyes in an act of reverse crying; and a wet promontory he must cling to for dear life. Witness for yourself how he becomes a rope, and see the lake where his ashes are scattered by grandsons in a very, very orange situation. Record your dreams, he seems to say, and record yourself in the process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Michael Philion
• Release date: Aug 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311460813

William Michael Philion

William Michael Philion was born and raised in upstate New York, the oldest of eight children. He has traveled extensively in the world and uses the experience to fuel his writing. Husband, father of three grown children and grandfather of four, he has enjoyed an international business career and, currently, is a teacher of German in New England. Author of two previous novels, writing is both his discipline and his passion.

Book preview

1.

Dream factory

You are a satellite with an eye. You circle the earth. You spy with your little eye a reef, you think, a dreamy pastel of coral, a huge enticing tangle of it snugged up to a coastline and you know there is life in it, maybe even on a scale too much for you to comprehend. The universe on a beach. A network of life off the charts for you. But it isn't coral, my friend, what you see with your eye—come down now for a tight close up—it's a brain. A human one.

Do you not trace its pathways with that eyeball of yours?

The dependencies and frantic darting of its tiny, teeming citizenry?

Its stripes and stars? Its fins and snouts? Its schools and monsters?

Do bubbles not bubble from its prolific production?

A coral reef that is time itself, rebuilding itself daily and ever growing, ever accreting, a womb in the sea, a harbor of memory. Waves and currents nourish this playground, lapping and winding sudsily through the coral. Pinpoint a particular grotto inside the reef, a wormhole with clown fish and shrimp the size of electrons. A salty splash in your face now and then. Life must eat to live. Eat the weak and be eaten by the strong so that a memory evolves, the echo of what was and is and will be even. Poof.

Can you breathe?

Bubbles, boiling up from the agitation of work, ingestion, absorption, secretion. A factory whose iridescent hues light up the ocean shelf it perches on before the drop-off into the rural abyss. Have a look at it, yes, swim upright with me to the very edge and look over it. Life gradually vanishes in this wet black hole. You are falling but you will not remember it. There is no memory there. No past or future, just a mired present. Colors pinwheel in your poor head and already things cover your body that want to partake of it, a sitting duck you are. Already you are being scanned and studied for the potential value you bring to the commune. You are being used and consumed in the death throes of life building.

My voice is echoing, I know. Such things are known to unsettle you. Eerie to your ear that a single creature should have two voices like this that make harmony and melody like an echo chamber. The atmosphere sounds metallic to your ear, the medium of briny water in a bowl the size of worlds having a rim and a tendency to roil and roll. You will be dizzy no doubt. You hear things. The lowing of whales, the chatter of porpoise, claws mounting rock, sea grass swooshing, a banking, shape-shifting field of sound and bubbles and movement. The clatter of processing, all around us here, in every dimension of every sense.

We are awash in creation and survival.

There are no newcomers, not even you, William Michael.

Over there, a herd of shrimp. Galloping to a birthing. A seahorse father past the bursting point in his labor, holding in his unborn progeny well beyond what is possible so that he has turned a rainbow of colors and finally can contain himself no more and pumps a great mass of the crustacean microscopics into the sea like a fireworks gun. Boom. Boom. Boom. Each muffled boom carrying a hundred neonates on its wings, tiny swimming eyeballs shot headlong into post-partum oblivion. The shrimp crush them, devour them like a seeing-eye candy. Now they're gone. And what of the father, you ask. Is he forlorn? How human, how quaint. Do you think such trivial matters as hurt or loss weigh on us?

Over there! Another pregnant dad. They are everywhere in the reef. His inward tail is wrapped around that sea twig. Do you see him swaying in the current? He is waiting. He gestates. He knows that the shrimp who will eat his offspring lurk in the great plains of sea grass and that they are watching him now with a programmed hunger that precludes the survival of all but a few of his brood.

A fairy tale where children pay the price? Obviously. A vast leafy woods, its dark center, two happy little seahorses gathering strawberries at the behest of an evil stepmother. The shrimp in waiting and the cute little all-eyed seahorses on their way to grandma's house. Guess who will win. This story is a vineyard of stories. The grapes are peeled in the bowl with the rim that rolls and roils. It is a story of things that live and what precious little they learn about themselves in the short time allotted them. We are here in the reef which is so vast it can be eyed from outer space, here with a purpose and that is to save you. If scare you we must, then scare you we shall.

So up you go now! Back into your accustomed air, back into whatever you think sleep is. Wake then later to the dream of life and its colors of day. Your mind is your own again 'til tomorrow we meet. And rest well, I tell you, for the reef will regale you with stories about You-Yourself-and-You, in order to sharpen you, dull you, stunt you and grow you, tire and excite you, exhaust and invigorate you, praise and admonish you, instruct and construct you. In short, to teach you about yourself, to keep you alive.

2.

Village idiot

You are spitting through your two front teeth. Walking home from school on a small town sidewalk and spitting at will. A sizable slit separates those two buck teeth and you are spitting through the slit. You possess your most recent school picture with a smile that attests to the grandeur of the slit. You cannot stop, and no one can stop you. Last night you hit a grand slam homerun to lead your Little League team to victory. The Beatles have happened just in time to provide the pop accompaniment to your accession to the throne. Things are coming together, planets aligning. You know the Mass in Latin. Again, you cannot be stopped. The headiness heightens your self-esteem to the point that you spit. You learn to sling your saliva through the slit, angling your tongue to propel it to either side, straight ahead on a frozen rope and in sweeping arcs, all with no discernible movement of your head. You can target, hit and drown ants from three yards. You are very cool. You are twelve. Your grandfather opens a window. He does not know that, in addition to all accomplishments previously listed, you have also bombed Junior Bright. But you feel that somehow he has found out and now you are going to pay. You know that your grandfather, despite a daily job as a functionary at the town hall, tends a mean beet garden and has been known to pick a fight when confronted with change he doesn’t like. Now the beet garden slides into place behind the grandfather who has folded his arms across his chest and is about to lean on you heavy for spitting through your big front teeth and for bombing Junior Bright.

You have grown up thinking that every town in the world has a village idiot, almost by definition. Junior Bright is the village idiot. An adult retard. You see him now. Junior stands at the corner by his house where he lives with his ancient mother, and waves at you and the other kids walking home from school. He smiles a helpless smile. While your grandfather looms before you with beets bulging red in the background, Junior Bright smiles at you with his retarded, friendly smile.

Junior, it's a bomb! That’s what you said as you and some friends tossed fistfuls of majestically hued fall leaves at him. Junior, it’s a bomb. You wanted him to run in fear. Your grandfather knows it. This will represent to his aging and protective mind some kind of changing of the generational guard, an unwelcome event to be sure.

Is Junior dead? He roars at you. Did you kill him? Did you spit your filthy spit at him? Now Junior is standing in the beet garden behind your grandfather. I’ll ask again, he says slowly. Did you throw a bomb at Junior?

You blame your friends first, blurting their names out without hesitation.

They did it.

You did it, your grandfather blasts you.

Junior waves a genial good-bye to you from a space between your grandfather’s back and the beet garden.

I didn’t kill Junior, Grandpa! He’s right behind you!

Your grandfather raises his hand to cuff you for insubordination and suddenly you are walking down Lower Maple on this endless journey home. You are tracking an old man in a long coat. Uncle Art. You pick him up near the bowling alley. An octogenarian whose nose runs like a faucet in every temperature and weather condition, snot just running down his upper lip into his mouth. The long black coat confers on him the aura of a crow flying away, and you wonder if he ever takes it off. When he speaks at you and your best friend Joey N., he caws through a crazy smile that makes you think of a crow flying through a sunshower. Uncle Art gives you a head fake and tears off in the opposite direction. The old crow is trying to outrun the twelve-year old boys on Lower Maple.

You and your buddy jump on the old crow’s back and soar into the heavens. You just wanted to make him fall down, to buckle his knees. Instead he grows wings and kidnaps you. He takes you to a nest that is on a mountain crag in a land unfamiliar to your eyes and minds. You are turned into bird eggs, little crows warming in his nest. You await your birth. You are plunked back onto the grimy tarmac of Lower Maple, and Joey N. and you are standing in the middle of Lower Maple, by the grocery that bisects your two streets. There is nothing left to do. You have had a good day. You do what you always do at this time of day, at this time in your lives, the Lucky Dance. Right there in the middle of Lower Maple by the grocery, timing your moves to the passing of oncoming cars, who cares, the Lucky Dance. Kind of like an Irish jig, it makes you feel lucky to be alive, that life is a dream and it will go on forever.

3.

Yellow canary

You are watching a tiny yellow canary fly into a coal mine. You watch and watch. You do not yet think about whether it is possible to intervene in the fate of the little bird. You believe you are stationed in the night sky. A gloaming suggests itself. Hope mixes with a sinking feeling in your gut. It seems he is flying into the teeth of the wind, making no progress. What is waiting for the bright yellow flier, this Tweetie Pie? Sylvester the black cat, his eyes wide and white but the hole of his mouth black with hunger? Is his long belly the shaft? Is there is no way out for the canary? Must it always be a helpless canary? Why not a red-shouldered hawk or a high-flying osprey? That is a good thought. You are aboard a sailboat on a sunny afternoon and you are looking into a blue sky, shielding your eyes. You are watching an osprey chase an invading eagle from his nest and out of his territory. It is a privilege to witness the wild kingdom and its laws. Such drama unfolds in slow motion above you, without you. Let such wonders not die in a mine shaft. So, no. The coal mine is no place for a hawk or an osprey.

Well, then, why not a cardinal or a cormorant, you think, for one is red and one skims the water. In a single flap of the wings it flies a league. Are they no less expendable than the