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Civil Aftermath

Dreamed 2024/1/5 by Wayan
For the ghost of Forrest Bess

A man's demolishing a home in a hot flat Texas town. Not that hard when your sledgehammer is a train! He laid track right through the house. Crazier yet, he's not at the throttle--set it somehow, and now he sits up front on the cowcatcher, laughing insanely. I wince and blink; don't want to see him pulped!

When I look back, the train's smaller, with a cockpit like a jet fighter's, though open to the sky (well, not sky--falling beams). He's in the pilot seat, a black woman just behind him as co-pilot. They pull down a hinged steel & glass roof, forming, with the small cowcatcher, the shape of a goose head! Now they can ram with impunity. The bill crashes through the house... and brings it down.

Train looking like a goose head smashes house. Dream sketch by Wayan in the style of Forrest Bess.
The demolition train rolls on. I watch from in a jeep in a parallel lane to the right, pacing the bill as it smashes more homes. Trainado path! Behind the engine are passenger cars, open windows bristling with rifles. They open fire on a row of shops to the left, widening devastation's track from a few yards to a hundred or more. This party's staging a coup to take over this small African nation... of Texas.

The jeep driver slows, the train pulls ahead, rolls on toward the downtown flats, still a mile away. We wave at cars a bus behind us, yell "Turn off! Firefight ahead!" We know it's still true because smoke rises downtown. Where there's gunsmoke, there's gunfire.

Volley of rifle fire from a traincar. Dream sketch by Wayan in the style of Forrest Bess.
Now it's years after, postwar. The country's poor, shot up, ecologically degraded--when cities burned, the woods went too. They haven't grown back yet--if they ever will. I head out of town, into what was savanna then, near-desert now. Hills eroded into badland bluffs.

Meet an old woman I know, a local. She has a microplane, and flies me over her old homestead for an overview of the land today. Looks like the Sahel. "I can't live off it now," she says. All red dust.

Or is that red paint? Ruddy clay sculptures dot the hills--lumps tubes cubes, domes & drums. Ruins or art? If art, ugly art.

Oh, the world's not dead. Not even culturally dead. Just... Texas. Global Texas.

Lumpish adobe or mud sculptures on dry savanna. Dream sketch by Wayan in the style of Forrest Bess.
Lumps of brown & pink. Motto: 'This, then, is art.' Dream sketch by Wayan.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

'Drawings', 1967, by Forrest Bess.
'Drawings' by Forrest Bess, 1967. This, then, is art.


LISTS AND LINKS: trains - Trump - two Biden dreams: Bident & "You're not my Boss!" - house & home - violence - puns? - guns - war - politics - the future - long-term predictive dreams? - global warming - sculpture - artists & the arts - apocalypse, & after - Global Texas from the dawn of time: Texans - Forrest Bess

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