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When I dream I am in the country. Green hills, roads without sidewalks, houses far apart. Clumps of trees, then open fields, broken wire fences. Damp. Quiet. Gray sky. True silence and birds.
I walk alone, looking for a young girl. Is it me? The distant swish of a car I can ignore, it's foreign and gone. What would I find if I could stay here? What would I be if I lived among this tremendous silence? There is water in the air and I cover up my neck. The breeze is slight and clean and cold.
When I wake the city is all around me. My small flat is tucked away among a tangle of old houses and a mass of ancient gardens gone wild. Silence here is a steady distant "on" sound, the whispers of thousands of refrigerators and tvs and computers. And, inside this envelope of mechanical silence, there are voices. The crowded talk, fantasies and rememberances of this city packed with dreamers roll out, over, through, all the clapboard and redwood and stucco, filter through the captive trees, speed with the winds down the corridors of the city streets.
I huddle here alone, mining this thick ocean of minds and messages, collecting raw images and radiant threads between people's experiences. They're jewels containing potential, action, and their own animation. I rummage around and pick some up, turning them over to see what they are made of.
These are the pieces of my puzzles, of my stories; their assembly, a sweet internal thrumming thrill that started up when I made that first puzzle.
Years ago, because of an extraordinary experience, I assembled one brightly original puzzle. It was a thin wiry neon scribbling of a spider, was also its web, was also a magician. This story I've kept, secret, its creature captive and writhing deep in a well that smells of dark colors.
Where is this well? Can we walk over to it and prod it with our finger, or more likely with a pencil, a stick, some metaphor that separates us from the unknown? Maybe it is set up on a table in the corner of my room. Maybe not. Anyway, I am showing it to you now. Let's say that in the corner of my workroom there is a square table, its top thirty-six inches to a side. The surface is dark mahogony, a shiny surface that reflects deep images in candle light. Sometimes I pull up a wicker chair, and there, near this magic spider in her magic well, I assemble puzzles into stories that somehow, through a bright magic web, on the back of a magician spider, come to you in your own dark corner of town.
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