Something Again

That old Arthur C. Clarke quote about technology so advanced it might as well be magic—that applies to sounds in the city, as well. The concrete beneath your feet as firm and as unyielding as physics allows is shaken by… what? There’s something down there. Something monstrous and strange in those tunnels. If I were a dragon (alas!), I’d hide in the subway tunnels that perforate NYC bedrock. Nobody would notice my rumblings or my fiery exhalations. I’d be just another sensory input for people beyond the ability to care.  

"Dragons in Subway Tunnels" -- with "Organ Flagpole" by Tad Neuhaus, Joanna Dane, and Loren Dempster

"Shae Hears 'I Will Follow' For the First Time" -- with "Area 51" by Tom Washatka

"Reflection Nebula" -- with "Black Hole" by Bill Gillard

"Five Strings and a Purpose" "Sparse Talent Squandered" "Send Not to Know for Whom" -- with "Slipstream" by John Mayrose

"Something Again" "Rainy Night Aubade" -- with Shadow Dance" by Ed Martin

"7 and 26 -- a song by Bill Gillard

"Ora et Labora -- with "5:13" by Bill Gillard

"Seven Sleepers" -- with "Suspend" by Paul Dietrich

"Egg Larva Pupa Imago" -- with "They are obviously sounds; that's why they are shadows" by Drew Whiting

 "Visions of Half Sleep" is a dreamlike soundscape, a collaboration among artists in northeast Wisconsin. It is Bill Gillard's words and voice along with music by many.

More from Bill Gillard

Website: www.billgillard.com

Instagram: billgillard3

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:10

Tom Machadka John Mayrose Ed Martin Paul Dietrich Drew Whiting and Bill Gillard Hypnagogia Presomnal Anthipnic Sations Phantasmata Praedor Mitium The Half Dream State Dreamlets the Wakefulness Sleep Transition These all describe the land between wide awake and deep sleep the borderland realm where we are neither alert nor unconscious, awake nor asleep, where we are neither our daytime selves nor the free roaming spirits of the dream realm. We are there right now in this pre-dream condition. Welcome to Visions of Half Sleep, a radio show by Bill Gillard that features music by artists from all over Northeast Wisconsin. The idea is that the show takes place in the middle ground between wakefulness and deep sleep, the time between when your head hits the pillow and when you've completely vanished from this world. The words and music ease you into this other world, the place we live for one-third of our lives. Poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Aigbeli, Greg Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad Newhouse, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, Drew Whiting. Find out more about the show, about the musicians, the writing. All of it's at billgillard.com. Dreams have a species of coherence. Fragments of one vision rest on another and careen off still another until something new is birthed. But we do not enter the dream world in a mad rush, no. The journey from wakefulness passes through the middle realm of half-sleep, a rocky highland where we spy deep dreams as they build scenery and fill their casts. We are aware and yet not. We shudder as the dream realm flashes into bright life. From the tall rooftops, people lean and watch the soft summer afternoon heat. Below them I crusade in the flush of innocence through the holy land of NYC. Mark's place across town. I am a warrior bound to take back CBTBs from the unbelievers. I am a warrior bound. And there's a bar called Mojo's, the scene five years later of our last fight ever. When I bought you a cactus for your birthday, and it only got worse from there. A grate in the street cuts loose a roar, a fiery blast from the Bleaker Street Six that burns off my sweat. The future comes on like that. Dragons' white eyes and acid roar down those dark tunnels below the city streets beyond human sight. But tonight's the night. Tony promised when you and I will begin. Teenage fan club at CB's with some girl he thinks I might like. Beware you dragons of light. We are coming in. So you seek audio exfoliation of expectation, liberation from humiliation, and the lush lyric language of lobotomies and emotional traffic. It's late on a school night. You're in bed across the room from your little sister is sleeping. You got the radio playing so no one else can hear. All the way down to the small numbers left of the dial. Every time a pilot of the airwave, some breezy college kid's taste rubs its back upon your window panes, that rubs its muzzle on the window panes. Every time the DJ starts talking, you reach up, turn the switch, check the number, the next station, and then the next. You bounce her black metal to a chantouse with a golden guitar case full of grievances. Then she's a model and she's looking good, and you press your palms to your temples. Let that Teutonic rhythmic intensity shove your excitable pulse to the blasting point. Then Lori Anderson sends your mattress spinning off the cyclone ring with Superman's hypersonic beep, beep, beep. And then down deeper into the dial. With a TV movie blends and the FM bands, there's something new. Your eyes open owl-like to the sound salvation. It's a clanking bottle behind a guitar that rings like beads in a glass jar. And you pull the covers back from your chest and swing your legs to the side of the bed and set up. I was on the outside when you said you said you needed me. And that line is right there, the promise of every love song, of every rock and roll dream ever dreamed by dreamer and miss fit so alone. You stand in your underpants and sway the newness of it all. You imagine in the sound a shy glance once or twice. The boy you saw on the ferry once or twice. And a sliver of a smile, especially for you. An outstretched hand. It's a love that says, come on. And the only response for a red-blooded young woman like you, the only response is don't walk away, Renee. But if you walk away, I will follow. He wasn't much good at sticking around, but here he is, in the eye of your mind, that fairy boy. The darkness fills with the light of his eyes, undemanding contact in your happy solitude. The radio pacemaker, heavy metal, long diesel engine of reality, the full curtain darkness times that little radio, tuned way down left of the dial. You stand there as the chorus repeats, knowing that your world was one way up until that point, but now it is irrevocably transformed. The song is over, it's all behind you. You slip back between the sheets. You click the volume to know, let the song play again and again in your mind. It hurts like bereavement when a great song ends. You have grown into a kind of woman who wants more and more and more and more and more and we're going to be able to do it. He smiled, waited for the waitress with the glistening bald head to respond with a smile at his joke. As she dropped the menu in front of him, and shuffled humidly to the next customer. Vic settled into his chair and swiveled it so he could take in the room ten tables all filled with the jabbering of languages he had never heard before, if that's what they were. Some sounds were hushed like a breeze and summer leaves. The corner table buzzed and hummed like the live wires, which, judging from the blue arcs dancing among the three-seated lovers, they might actually be. It had been days or weeks or seconds or millennia since Vic's resupply interport went off course on the Orion route, found its way to Monaseros, which is the surprising location that Vic, who was still coughing on a fluorofluorocarbon from the long dream of space travel, had to check through an actual window before he believed that nobody had ever ventured out this far. And for good reason. Human anatomy, plus even a weak X-ray nova like A0620, make for a painful, upbeat, quick death. Nevertheless, here he was in this diner inexplicably, and he realized he was hungry. He swiveled back to take a look at the menu. The donut he asked for had appeared on a black plate with a yellow rim. He regarded the chocolate torus. Something about that shape reminded him of stuff he learned about at pilot school. Things like singularities and wormholes. He closed his eyes tight. Black holes. Monoceros. There's no way his little pressurized can with its third-hand negative mass thrusters and graviton cells could have avoided the event horizon of that system, the nearest black hole to Earth. He remembered waking up jarringly from the long sleep. He remembered understanding quickly how screwed he actually was. He remembered settling into his seat and cranking the music, Kevlar Medulla, subtonal opera number I. The favorite of his youth to focus his mind. He remembered the vague nausea and the strange blue shimmers the starfield curved into an ever-shrinking ellipse. And then he remembered nothing until the tinkling of this bell and the welcoming electric aroma of coffee. He took a bite. Now that was real, he thought. He was sure of that. The song came on the diner's jukebox that oldie by Sir Carter Knowles he used to like. He turned again to find the room filled with people. Actual human people dressed sharp and happily eating breakfast. At the corner table sat a woman with two small boys. One boy ate oatmeal while he colored his placemat with a crayon. The other held a chocolate donut aloft on his index finger, nibbling at the edge and turning it slowly. Vic smiled. Nice family. The dress the mother wore looked familiar. She lifted her head and for the first time noticed Vic. A curious puzzlement came over her face. She lifted her hand as if to wave. But Vic turned away in alarm. He shook his head and dug his fingernails into each palm to try to wake himself up. He took a big bite of the donut that still hung from his finger. He felt his memory, his mind, and his body stretched thin through a prism of confusion and loss. Spaghetti. That's what he felt like for dinner. Spaghetti. When she dusts it off, he says he never learned to play it, but he wanted to. Says he used to listen to Woody Guthrie and New Christie Minstrels and Simon and Garfunkel. And he should dig out his old records. And Shay just nods. And then finally, can I try it? She says. And he says, sure. He shows her how to tune it, but she doesn't really understand, and shows her how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the highest string. The next day she stops at a bookstore near the ferry terminal in Manhattan and buys the beginner's guide to playing guitar. It's a picture book with a bunch of chords and simple songs. I've been working on the railroad. Happy birthday. She studies it for the whole ferry ride. By the time she's home, she goes to her room, shuts the door. Even without that D string, she finds her way to the E major chord. And then and then and then and then the A major and then and then and then and then the D major, and for a week that's all she plays. Surprised at how the blues feel inside her fleshy body more than it sounds from the wooden body she holds. How it feels deep down. And the moment comes when she plays the E, then D, then A, then A, then D, then E, and night moves is born wriggling into the bedroom air. She plays that for about two weeks straight. She picks up G and C in the endless realm of bar chords. She drops a needle on rocket to Russia and plays along with Creighton Hop till her fingers rub raw. She lies in bed and her mind jumps a turnstile for the eight train rolling past East New York, adrenaline, then up into the night. Through the lights, under the sky, across broad channel, and out to rock rock rockaway beach, where the waves kiss the sand like a tropical island, all for the price of a single token. In her mind, she's chewing out the rhythm on her bubblegum, sand between her toes, five strings, and a purpose. Certainly not written better, although few of any age can say they have. Spent not nearly enough time in a canoe in Maine. I've lived longer than Poe and happier. But the horrors of the blood spring a page just as sure as spring days do loved ones eager for more than my company. I've lived longer than Fitzgerald, his boat long since surrendered to the current, while mine marooned in rushes, born neither to the past nor the future, one battle erect in mud. I've almost caught up to Richard Wright and Emily Dickinson, whose mirrors would have envied mine, white and male and free, and who made great art despite the slings of outrageous fortune. These words too, lounge on an easy couch, while I do other things with what little time I have remaining until I end up on the poster. Sparse, talent, squandered. And that's it, my big idea. A biography series about people not listed among the great, but people like me, for whom a single life never got started, for whom the main channel of the river diverged along the way in all of this tall grass, when the water table dropped, a drought of a life human, a broken, poetic form. The night nurse frowns in alarm. The numbers don't match what the chart tells him. The nurse's life is about having things slide into well-worn grooves. The ghost of the hospital supervisor, a young woman he has seen in meetings, stands behind him with a clipboard. While the nurse wriggles wires behind the misbehaving monitor. She finds his professionalism wanting as he misses obvious clues. They both know that the hospital is cash-strapped and risk averse with a shaky palm on the e-ject knob for careers more established than both of theirs. The nurse reads the monitor's manual that hangs from a plastic strap and thinks of the English major who must have done the editing on the engineer's text speak so that a night nurse might understand. The monitor flashes a chaos of conflicting vital signs. He puts a hand on the patient's chest to confirm the rise and fall and rise and fall of life. He thinks of the poem Mr. Bell used to recite at the end of bio class on Fridays. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. His mind wanders to the bulb dappled tiles that shine, the night cleaning crew moving beds and scrubbing it all down, moving beds and moving beds, and there, behind the machine, down low along the wall, the plug that draws electrons for it all, the plug that hangs loose, limp, ready to drop into impotency. The nurse reaches down and shoves it back into the wall, and the monitor beeps the way it should. The blood pressure cuff inflates as it should. The patient stirs and asks, Is that for me? And just like in the poem, the nurse says, It's for you and for me. Go back to sleep. Everything's okay. And it is. He wrote in a note he sent to Mr. Bell the next day. Thank you for inspiring me to be involved in mankind, the note said. The nurse did not see it, but days later, the torn white envelope in hand, his old bioteacher, Mr. Bell, cried mailroom tears. The illusions that flash in your mind in the moments before sleep. Stories and poems by Bill Gillard, music by Bill Gillard, and others. All details are available at BillGillard.com. This episode is titled Something Again. It features music by Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Tom Woshatka, John Mayrose, Ed Martin, Paul Dietrich, Drew Whiting, and Bill Gillard. A brown bear shakes off the wet cold. Its nose alert. Knocks me eye to eye. And then chases me down the muddy road. Fear at my back. Up ahead on higher ground. A house is just being built. Roof on, yes, but no windows yet. No interior finish, just roughed out. I can hide in there. But inside there are no doors. Quiet in a closet I sit. The bear snuffles, the dirt. Rustle, rustle, then silence. The floors in this room are finished. There's track lighting on the ceiling. Through the door into a kitchen, wide plank floors, stainless everything. Then Joanna enters, says hello. Like nothing ever happened. And she never died. She is, as I remember her, a smile and her wispy two long bangs, a t-shirt loose tumbling off her shoulders. I remember Hawaii, she says. I do too. The first plane after a hurricane, a world wrecked flowers. The early summer blossoms, a petal storm in the terminal. Everywhere flowers. Joanna everywhere. Beauty and destruction in my memory. The sweet smell of death and life in her hair for weeks. And now her son enters the kitchen, sits and smiles shy. He looks nothing like me. She strokes his hair, his art tapes the refrigerator. He looks like a fine boy. Through the window, now roughed out, painless. There's rustling again in the underbrush. A bear! I shout, but Joanna smiles. A bear, you say. Look again. It's a shaggy dog with two long bangs. It nuzzles the bottom step, trundles up the stairs to find love at Joanna's feet. Ha! I know the way now. I know the way now, down the stairs and into the day. But one last time, she calls to me. She shakes some worlds from a gold leaf paper. It catches light, sparkles for a second, drops to me below. And on the gold, these black letters, we are each of us in motion. The past is not fixed. We chase dreams that scatter like petals after a storm. I wanted to be beautiful for you. After all this time, I wanted to reveal myself in complexity, bitter, majestic, angry, irresistible, predator and prey, bear and dog, blood letters on gold paper. I wanted all of this for you. And then the gold leaf turns to brown in my hands. And the house. Our house. Incomplete, unbuilt, windowless, empty. A fallen leaf of an autumn-long past that mixes with forest. Crumbles as I hold it. And at my back, the familiar low growl. Walking and then running, fingering dead, the dead leaves remains in my pocket. I know the way now. I know the way now. I run toward something again. I know the way now. I know the way now toward something, anything. Again, you can do that. Sometimes make noise. Sometimes like rain in a bucket beneath a leaky gutter in the night, by a window closed against darkness, and the wet, wet bell, bell. A single staccato note like a pulse the night makes audible by accident. Memory is patient, as humble as the heart, as accidental as a discarded metal bucket that amplifies the rain. Later, my lover's heartbeat long stilled, audible in my dream. My ear against her bare chest, somehow whole again. Somehow whole again. In the dream, that face, her face, is alive. I've seen her. I've heard her in distant thunder and steaming earth and broken clouds in rain. It falls on my hand. But her face, the image fades as it did once before. Too soon. The clouds part, make way for the dawn, and I wake to a sparkling springtime Sunday. The monks will herd men to the chapel for Mass, and then, when it's concluded, they will singularly occupy classrooms into which each man takes his turn. The theme: How have you used your clear and generous gifts for the good of humanity? Anyone deemed unworthy will be sentenced to atone for the waste, to make good somehow on the fruitless investment the school made in them 40 years before, to expose those who have squandered the talents they had been entrusted with, those whose life amounted to less than the sum of its components. Bell imagines waiting with one or two others outside of the classroom in the history wing, grim and silent vestiges of classmates he barely remembers. But they're unimportant now. The time to make connections has long passed. Some wear jackets and ties, their hair immaculate. Others, like Bell, dress casually and regret it. Bell scans his life for the words to explain decades of thirsting through a desert, whose grains of sand are the pages of books and vain hopes for domestic fulfillment, the retreat to teaching, to never leaving his high school. One man whose face Bell cannot place, leaves the room stone-faced and hurries down the hall. The next in line enters and the door clicks shut. Bell is now alone. How does one measure one's worth? The motto of the school, pray and work, is not much helped. How does one measure a life of prayer? And is it hours of work in some particularly selfless field? Bell imagines a wealthy man on a super yacht. Aristotle said happiness provides meaning and purpose. The guy on the yacht looks happy. Bell recalls conversations at the lunch table with the religion teachers. To be one's true self, Heidegger said. It was freedom for Sartre. Living in the moment for Emerson, Camus said, don't think too much. To dance, said Nietzsche. Des Beauvoir says it is caring for others. Struck by the silence of the classroom behind the closed door, the man in front of him seems self-assured. Bell feels his heart pounding in his chest. Epicurus, millennia ago, said it was all about the friends you make and keep. If Bell knew what was on the test, he was sure he could ace it. Pencils down, the existential proctor says as the classroom door opens. The man Bell does not recognize gives him a quick nod and hurries down the hallway. Inside the room, Bell sees two chairs, a small table with a reading lamp that makes a circle of light on the tile floor, and nothing else. Cicero cannot help him now, nor Thomas Merton, who said the answers are inside of us all along. Bell laughs, thinking about how singularly unhelpful he always found Thomas Merton. But that's likely Bell's failing, the limitations of his intellect, of his spirit. Judgment Day, yes. But every day is judgment day for Emerson, the fractal reality that if the entirety of one's life can be judged, then so can each year, month, week, day, hour, and every second in this vision, Bell enters the room and pulls the door shut. Click behind him. One of them, this famous grotto, resembles a cave. It's lined in the inside with bricks and recessed arched vaults. References to the seven sleepers can be found throughout the holy site. Marmusa Syria has a small cave that also features a telling of the story in images and text carved into the walls of the cave. Ephesus, Turkey contains the remnants of a Byzantine necropolis, many of which have references inscribed into stone of the seven sleepers. Here's how the story goes. The year was A.D. 250, and Roman Emperor Decius was bent on eliminating the struggling first green shoots of Christianity from his realm. In his campaign of arrest and intimidation, he rounded up seven young men and accused them of being Christians. Decius offered them the chance to recant and to pay homage to the Roman gods instead. They refused and retreated to a remote mountain region where they hid in a cave. When Roman soldiers found them, they decided to seal the cave with the young men inside, and young men were soon forgotten. Many years passed, Decius died, and eventually Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. The year was then 447 A.D., about 200 years later. And the landowner decided to open that cave to use for his flock. He was shocked to find bodies inside. He initially assumed they were dead, of course, but soon they stirred, rousing themselves from their long night. The sleepers then ventured into the city of Ephesus, where they're shocked to find themselves in the midst of great churches, each one of them topped by a cross. The ancient money they tried to use caused a stir as well, and so the bishop summoned them. They told them their story, that they had resisted the might of the emperor and had slept for 200 years to awake to a world transformed. The story continues to be known, but often only in fragments of language. The Magyar language, for example, contains the word Hetalvo, which literally means a seven sleeper, or one who sleeps for an entire week. It's used jokingly to disparage someone who has overslept. The Norwegian language has a similar word, sisover, a seven sleeper. In Welsh, too, an oversleeper is mockingly called a sisgador, which combines the word for sleep and the word for seven. These sleepers of legend are revered for their faith and steadfastness, rewarded as it was by the spread of Christianity. They believed they had slept only one night while everyone they ever knew had lived and died while they remained in the cave. They did nothing for 200 years, and yet they awoke to find their fondest wishes had come true. And we whose sleep is measured in hours and not days or weeks, or months or years or centuries, we also wake each day to a world transformed. Dark as it is now, as you're hearing me now. All will be illuminated and soon. If only we close our eyes and surrender our will and our consciousness to the dream realm for a while. We close our eyes at the end of each day. One of the precious few days we have on this green and good earth. We close our eyes knowing almost all that we have done, and some of what we have left undone. We surrender to the void. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we wake each morning to a world transformed exactly as it was for those seven sleepers. Through no effort on our part, lives have been cherished and lost, promises made and broken, hearts elevated and crushed in the day that has passed beneath our bed, and in the nocturnal world that embraces us. Now, here in this waxing daylight, we know very little of what awaits us when we emerge from our cave, once the morning sun again gladdens the sky. Outside the window, the rest of his class played noisily inside silence. Kenny pinched off a crumb of a sandwich and dropped it into the tank where it fell among scattered oatmeal and breadcrumbs. In the corner of the tank, unmoving. A tiny, thin, white shape. The door opened behind him. Ken. The boy did not look at his father. He did stop chewing, though. Footsteps. Oh, Kenny. That was his mother. She crouched next to him. Look at me, please. I don't see why we just don't throw the thing away and be done with it. Joe, hush. Hey, I'm not the one with the problem here. I'm missing a half day of work. And here I am back in fourth grade with a bug, and you tell me, Joe, please. You promised. Kenny chewed his sandwich again. You see, I told you, it's dead like all the others. That was Mrs. Snagler. Kenneth, why don't you go outside and play with the other children? Look at your teacher when she's talking. Kenny's father spun the desk around roughly so the boy faced the three adults. I'm here to throw that dead bug away so we can all get on with our lives. Joe, you promise to be sensitive. This has never happened in all my years. It's not dead. Three adults stopped talking and looked down at the boy. It's not dead. It's pupating. I don't care if it's dancing the jig, I'm flushing it. Honey, your father's right. Kind of. It really is dead. I mean, look at it, all dried up and brown. Kenny's mom shivered. When's the last time it moved, anyway? Insects don't move during metamorphosis. Kenny spoke calmly, looked down at his hands. Kenny's mom said, Wish you hadn't started with this whole thing. Imagine telling your students they were responsible for a mealworm. It's actually a lesson that has worked for many years. It teaches a student about respect for life and responsibility. But he takes these things to heart. All of the other worms died in a few days like they always do. The rest of the class has moved on to the study of the planets. But Kenneth, bless his heart, seems kind of stuck. He won't let me clean out the tank. The thing is dead, dear. You did your best. It's time to move on. His name is Sparky, Kenny said. He's not a thing. Mrs. Snagler waved at the window to shoe away the children who were looking in to see if Kenny got in trouble. Kenny's mom took his hand and gently pulled him toward the door. Kenny held on. His desk dragged across the floor until his father made him let go. He's still alive, Kenny screamed, dug his heels into the linoleum. But his father scooped him up, carried him under his arm. He's going to be a beetle, a mealworm beetle. The last thing Kenny saw in the classroom was Mrs. Snagler standing with her arms crossed, glaring at him from behind his parents' back, blocking his view of Sparky's tank. Behind her, bright sunshine reflected off the swings and slides, and Kenny's classmates peered inside. Watch the change that had taken hold of the kid they figured was going to stay quiet his whole life. The warning in our tired blood of all that wakes and waits in the coming blackness. We meet our nightly death, surrender our will, our purpose, ourselves to visions of half-sleep that flow from that midnight realm, our fragile lives, these tired lights, they make soft shadows. We float silently toward sleep's moonlit gate. Gossamer life in this black blankness, this nightly death summoned. We surrender now to haunt the land beyond the moonlit gate of dreams. In visions of half sleep, visions of half sleep. Visions of half sleep. Visions of half-sleep is a radio show by Bill Gillard that features music by artists from all over northeast Wisconsin. The poems and stories are by Bill Gillard, and the music is by Nanny Agbeli, Craig Sabulski, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Paul Dietrich, Bill Gillard, Ed Martin, John Mayrose, Tad Newhouse, Nadia Nordhaus, Offsite, Tom Washatka, and Drew Whiting. All details are available at billgillard.com. We'll be back next week at this time. For more visions of half sleep. Until then, pleasant dreams. This episode is titled Something Again. It features music by Tad Newhouse, Joanna Dane, Lauren Dempster, Tom Ojotka, John Mayrose, Ed Martin, Dre, Andrew White, and Bill Killer.