DREAMS OF BLOOD AND THUNDER

A fetal scan projected on the White Cliffs of Dover

Two chapters in the anthology “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams”  by Tim Barrus (published under the nom de plume of "Nasdijj")  are mirror versions of each other and yet they are not, each coming from a different point of view.  The story that gives the book its title (and was the original version in Esquire magazine) weaves together the Navajo setting, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which was just coming to consciousness at the time), and a father’s love of his son, who dies.  The point of view is the father’s, despairing over his own limitations and inability to save the very young boy.  The second, “Dreams Come Down Like Thunder,” is from the son’s point of view, now adult, looking at his all-powerful but deeply flawed father and wondering how much is inherited by himself.

Consider these two paragraphs, one from the first story and one from the next.  

1.  “Fishing with my son was like surrendering myself to the talons of some wondrous beast.  Death is always the uncharted logic of its wars, the punished boy child who has been terribly burned, disfigured, standing like an Aztec priest under his father’s infinity.”

2.  “I have a recurring vision, a nightly dream where my cowboy fisherman father, the white man whom I look like and take after, returns to me mounted on a horse.  Life itself seems suspended.  His despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Him struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods. . . ride with him through the dream I must.” . . .  later:  “I wish there was something other than my father to hang on to.  But there is nothing.”

I will say -- provocatively -- that these are deeply Euro-Christian visions in spite of the invocation of Aztecs, who cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices -- who were not necessarily their sons.  It was Abraham who was about to cut out the heart of Isaac before the ultimate Father relented.  The New Testament version is, of course, Jesus broken and splayed naked by authorities for all to see, unable to escape except through transcendence eventually provided by his Father/God.  No one saw it -- it happened in the darkness of the cave/tomb.  Did Jesus dream his resurrection?

Waking from his dream, the author comes down from the sleeping loft of his cabin and escapes on his father’s horse, “which has a saddle now.  Through the woods again, and the dreams come down like thunder in the rain.  My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

He is as much seized as his father.  He sees the abyss that terrified his father.  We know from the previous story that his vehicle is Old Big Wanda, the F150 Ford pickup that he immobilized so that his little son could pretend to drive it.  But at the end we see that HE is the horse, with life as the bit in his teeth.  A horse who takes the bit in his teeth is uncontrollable.  

The rules of some kinds of literary criticism say that the author’s personal life cannot be drawn into the discussion and others, probably less adept at the literary elements, can ONLY discuss writing in terms of the author’s life.  I’ll pick my way through here by revealing only a few things from the author’s life.  One is a Methodist upbringing spiked by counterculture indignation (if God is God, He is not good.); one is that Old Big Wanda is a real truck I have seen in photos; and one is the observation that has been made by others:  that writers spin out their stories from their own volcanic hearts, pounding them into slightly new shapes on the old themes.  Virtual worlds come from the details of actual worlds.

The father/son relationship, particularly in terms of power differential and obligation, is the crux here as in all of the three Nasdijj books.  Tim’s life has been a consuming effort to help sons, boys, esp. the ones at risk, including himself, and to empower them to save themselves -- both practically and politically.  There is no need to summon up Tim’s genetic family, but the shadow of abuse is palpable.  

Stick to the tropes.  The horse: Pegasus, the winged horse, is the embodiment of poetry.  Woods: not forest but second growth where the smaller animals find food and shelter, where dryads and nymphs pursued by rapists can escape by becoming daphne, laurel, willow.  Buzzards: death on wings.  Dragons: power on wings.  Stars: more sky stuff.  This is“Star Wars.”   Fishing: the hidden lives in water teased out by skill and proper equipment.  The source of sustenance, the substance of transmitted skills, shared joy. 

Phaeton

What is more powerful than the father, even the father in the sky?  What is the meaning of the recurrent word “light”?  Ultimately is it the sun that curbs the hubris of Icarus, who flew too high, and Phaeton, who attempted to drive his father's Sun chariot but lost control and set the earth on fire.  Or is it being able to see?  Enlightenment.

What does the dog stand for?  “She went back and forth between the two of us like a gentle conduit between his demons and my determination to tame them.”  Sounds like the ideal mother or wife, an aspect of a human wife.  But NOT the real mother because the ultimate source of the damage was the drunken mother.  “I am still trying to find ways to forgive her.”  The man wants to do the mothering.  He has a hard time sharing it except with the dog.  In the wilderness the wife and the hospital are pushed aside.

As for many others, water is the transcendence, that old baptism, “where the sun glitters golden on the gravel of the riverbed, and life with all its prowess, its struggle, its tenacity, and its yielding exists in a turbulent crescendo all around you as it rushes downstream, uncomplicated by the complicated likes of man.”  This is where the boy dies.  Then there is nothing.  “Just the soft sound of the river, with its unruly grandeur and its fluid savvy.” 

The Abyss by nac-nud

In the second story -- near the beginning of it -- the man says, “I was a major disappointment to him in his life.”  But nearer the end the father says, “I’m the one who was a disappointment to you. . . I couldn’t MAKE you grounded.”  Now the father’s mother is present and tries to intervene, but the father demands that the author back up the pickup with an empty stock trailer attached.  It’s too much.  The father/boy is again helpless on his father’s anvil, pounded, seized and unseeing.  He senses the abyss under them, not the sky and the light.  It is night.  

Go back and reread:  “My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

Dreams are projections on an unyielding world.  Indians know.