Star Traveler - Eden Saga

On an ageless night, I descended into the womb of dreams. The aurora had not yet stained with pink the curtains of the world and already, large foliage turned upside down by the winds, my heart beat against the opaque walls of existence. I saw the light and I switched bodies.

I flew

The poet in me—wounded beast with the fangs of the absurd — had grown weary of the sputum of reality: the town chats, the passersby without eyes, the harsh light of the days. So I planted my flags in the ether, and I said:

“Since life refuses itself to me, I will build my kingdoms in sleep.“

Every night, I leaned over the black chasm of closed eyelids like an alchemist on his crucible. I threw myself into it naked, without words, without form, begging for the sacred fire. And in that dizziness, something gave way. The dream, until then a crazy rider, bent his knee. I saw the walls dissolve, the faces recompose according to my desires. The time was unfolding in a spiral. The laws were mine.

I flew. I liked it. I knew.

I was flying, I swear it, I swear that I was flying
My heart opened its arms, I was no longer barbaric
And the war came, and here we are tonight
(Jacques Brel, Mon EnfanceMy Childhood)

I now live in another body, less thick, less material. My old body remains on earth, uninhabited. He hardly misses me, I don’t miss him either. Where I live, I see. Where I am, I exist. If you are looking for me, join me there.

Rely on dreams for in them is hidden the door to eternity.
Khalil Gibran

Up there

The sky, up there, never has anger. It speaks to me in fluid colors and the sea, a sweet lover, offers me its singing shells. I repainted the grey faces of the world with inks drawn from sleep: violent blues, liquid oranges, scented silences.

Every morning, reflecting from the dream, I open my eyes as one opens a door on a barren garden. The real, still collapsed, is covered by a more tender veil. I see in it the rift, but also the light that infiltrates it. The horror has not been extinguished: modest, it is draped in my hidden fabrics.

I am no longer the condemned spectator of a lost world. Here I am, the invisible artisan, the sculptor on the other side of the mirror. And even if the day strangles me, the night makes me infinite.

Time becomes an infinite line on which I travel as I please, posing in the moment on the thread of eternity like a migratory bird seeking rest on a cable of chance.

I am so well up there, with my friend Lao.

When emptiness reaches the inside of the skull, that is the beginning of wisdom
Lao Surlam

The eye high, the heart bent

One evening, moreover, I took the shape of a bird. It was not a dream, nor even a flight. It was an ascent. I no longer had a name, more subtle or gross bodies, but warm wings, rimmed with lightning and oblivion. My heart, now broken, palpitated to the rhythm of the hills. Each beat lifted the world with a lash of light.

I had torn myself away from the creaking cobblestones, the cracked figures of ordinary days. From above, the human pains were no more than tremors in the cloudy water. The shouts, the races, the angers—all that seemed like breaths in the dust, lines in the sand that the sea would come to smooth.

I was hovering. Not for pride, but for clarity. I saw the child who cries in a wet courtyard, the tired woman whose laughter only comes out as memories, the man on his knees under the invisible weight of a future too heavy. I couldn’t tell them anything, but I covered them with my gaze.

Burst of azure

Immersed in the sources of the dream, he is no longer the gaze of a man. He is no longer a judgment. Here is an invisible caress, a burst of azure resting on the temples, a warm sigh that makes the curved necks straighten.

The world below doesn’t realize it. They shiver, barely. Tears dry a little faster. The walls began to vibrate with a forgotten memory. And sometimes, without knowing why, a passerby raises his head to the sky, just for a second—as if the echo of a wing had brushed against his soul.

It is only I, the bird-poet, transfigured by sleep, returned to sow indulgence in the furrows of reality. I do not heal anything, I do not erase, I place on everything a hint of tender gold, a dreamy down fallen from my feathers.

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
William Shakespeare

The blue waterfall

The dawn is a cruel frontier. I am still up there, grazing the roofs of the night, when my wings perceive a foreign cold. Not the coldness of the wind, but that of time—this slow grin that always returns to claim the absent bodies. The dream, so vast, so true, twisted at its angles. The air became dense, the colors paled like a stained glass window without fire.

I understood that I cannot remain a bird. My drunken flight once became uncertainty. Each wing reminds me that I bore a name, weighed a weight, opened a mouth to nourish with words. The world below, this rough old world, was calling me.

And I fell.

Not in a violent fall, rather a sad slide, like a cloth that is carefully folded to store it. I enter my cold body like a winter evening. My fingers feel heavy and greedy, my eyes clouded with sleep. No doubt. I found the sweet prison of man, this dress too tight for the soul.

Don’t be afraid of the world, my friend. The world should be afraid of you.
Lao Surlam

Like a discreet fire

The dream, however, does not fade away—it withdraws, slowly, leaving on the sand of time shells and secrets. I still keep, under my eyelashes, a bit of the feather sky. But the world has taken me back, with its harsh angles, its crackling noises, its absurd truths.

First of all, I thought I was dead. I saw hell. It’s not the others who make hell, it’s their number. They proliferate like shadows and their shadows make the night. I wasn’t really dead, just asleep. Simple sleeper like so many others, in the heart of the world where one is bored. I cried.

Without sadness, with gratitude. Now I knew.

In the dream, we only live for a time. But the dream can live within us, discreet fire, honey under the tongue, tiny star in the dark of the eye. I take it everywhere. In the street. In books. In the eyes of a passerby that my wing brushed against.

“One must know how to attach a price to the useless, one must want to dream.The man alone is perhaps capable of an effort of this kind.”
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

The Watchman’s Last Sleep

Since this gentle fall, a watchman leaning against the window of the unreal, I live between two worlds. Half dead, half dying, I thin time. I ignore the present, delighted by the past, exalted by the boon of a finite time so poorly defined. I walk in the city but barely brush against it. The passersby cross me, quickly passed, pressed mists. I speak, I laugh, I sleep—but everything in me remains tense towards the invisible Eden that opened yesterday under my eyelids.

That Eden has never left me.

Sometimes, in the bend of a breath, it comes back to me: a burst of azure between two syllables, a shiver, a breath of wind that does not feel the earth. So under my closed eyes, briefly, I inspire an absence.

Others don’t understand. Don’t look at me. For them, I barely exist. What does it matter? Have they only known the saga of silence? Did they follow the river? Did they weave this long vermilion of silence?

Even the wolves

They will never know that I was a bird. Flying over the pains. Caressing the untouched soul. Loving the worlds more than a woman, better than a god. And that I fell, not out of punishment, but out of necessity.

We must return, always. Even the wolf returns to the den under the crumbled snow. I must watch over the clan, hold another winter. But in my strange, frightened night… nothing changes.

Dream always

I fall asleep every night believing without believing, proud of the half-known that there is something else after the walls, beyond the legends, behind the words of the world. It’s not a lie. In the winged shadow of the bird that I was, it’s my fidelity. Long fire that still burns, softly, under the forehead.

Will come last night, infinite. Ununited, I would not return from it. I would be without desire for prayers. Pure gift, the light will have wings for me. And zeal. And the eternal dream. Dream!

Dream just once, for the last time.
Dream every summer, all realities exalted in the heart, without illusion, without fear.

And leave early.

And die of happiness.