“‘Sometimes I have this dream,’ the young man in the wheelchair said. His voice had a strange echo to it, as if it were rising up from the bottom of a cavernous hole. ‘There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories lie. It’s stuck deep down inside. It doesn’t hurt or weigh me down– it’s just stuck there. And I’m standing off to one side, looking at this like it’s happening to someone else. I want someone to pull the knife out, but no one knows it’s stuck inside my head. I think about plucking it out myself, but I can’t reach my hands inside my head. It’s the strangest thing. I can stab myself, but I can’t reach the knife to pull it out. And then everything starts to disappear. I start to fade away, too. Only, the knife is always there– the the very end. Like the bone of some prehistoric animal on the beach. That’s the kind of dream I have,’ he said.”
—-Haruki Murakami (from The Hunting Knife in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)
There is something less threatening when it repeats. When it echoes pink from its blade. When Warhol calls it art and not weaponry. Cast iron can replace analyst for hippocampus sharpener. Where does this persistence derive. Chins carry the most tremble and they house dreams as well as meals for teeth. There is a cherry tree on left hip and gang of macintosh on the right. Blood is less threatening when metaphor’d into fruit montages. What separates memory from me or memo or rome of nucleus. Literature. Long distance love affair with book musk and October audit. Instrumental collapse. Awake.
Aimee Herman 