A Dream: America 2060
Ali Eteraz
It was a liquid blackboard 20 by 20. I dusted it with my wrist. I placed my
hand
in the center. Three blue lights came on. Soft lasers emitted; they coalesced
into one. A trinity turning tawhidic. It leapt up to my forehead and became a
blue bindya (think India). There was in my skull a pressure so small. Like a
thumb pressing a stamp. It became a buzzing tedium (Pessoan). With a small flicker
the contents of my thoughts were projected onto the screen. There were thin slices
of images, pared like poundcakes, then repared. I closed my eyes and focused.
I gained a sense of the contours of my thoughts. I entered the inky ether. The
one inside myself. That Scythian sewer, that well of shame and suffocation that
feeds art, which gave the world the ballads of Tzara and Calgary’s vulgar bard
Bok. In this congealed muck, this moist blackness, akin to the way a straight
man thinks a gay man imagines a vagina, which is dark as nihilism, a bin full
of squeaking beetles, a shadowsnake vomiting its twin, its thrin, I had my first
sighting. Of it. A polygonal dot Mo called Gabriel, a thrum of revelation, Sartrean
secretion of Nothingness, producing a Nietzschean inversion once called God. “What
do you seek to signify?” said the spot. “What should I describe in
the lie that is language?” And without ado (and a don’t), the uncreated
component of my soul (the Asharite), it began speaking, and the phonemes that
were produced turned into speech coming out of the mouth of the version of me
that can be considered created (the Mutazilite). And the description became something
tangible, something rendered physical, a dancing ballerina on the surface of
the board. It was not like having a dream. It was something other. Ilham, the
multiplicity of dreams. Let’s call it Ilhamination. And I could see suddenly
the whole world around me. The Caliph’s face turning ugly; the Pope’s electrical
crucifixion (evocative of Bacon) during some tumult in the Vatican; a terrorist
named Don Nocturno holding hostage beleaguered presidents in a territory with
no name. Or maybe the name was Terrortories. And there were fields of green littered
with a race of men called The Other. And they were all dead because of some forced
resettlement. It wasn’t Ohio but Ohellno. It wasn’t Illinois but Killingnoise.
It wasn’t America. No, it was.
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