pitomeč: mars 2009

Je lis „Prison writings – my life is my Sun Dance” de Leonard Peltier; publie en 1999.
-fin du chapitre 33 et chapitre 34-

Down in the Hole, I dream. I feel myself falling, falling. Sort of like Alice down the rabbit hole, only it's a fall that never ends. There's no floor, no bottom, no stopping point. It's not space I'm falling through, or even time. It's the hole in my own self. I'm falling through the empty space where my life is supposed to be. I've been falling that way, in free fall from nowhere to nowhere, for nearly a quarter of a century now.
(ajouter dix ans, L P est en prison depuis 1976, condamne jusqu'en 2041 car il purge une double peine d'une vie pour un double crime qu'il n'a d'ailleurs pas commis plus sept ans pour avoir tente de s'evader)
Maybe that's why they call it the Hole. It's the Hole inside of myself that I can never get out of.
While I fall, I let myself dream. Am I dreaming or am I being dreamed ? Sometimes I'm not sure. Anyway, here's one of my dreams that I've written down. I've had it in various forms many times. Often it comes to me in that state between waking and sleeping. My grandmother told me that was the holiest time, that little moment between waking and sleeping, that little luminous crack between this world and that other, greater reality that contains this little reality we call our lives. The dream always begin back at my childhood home, my grandparents' little house in the woods at Turtle Mountain, back in North Dakota, right near the Canadian border. I'm not quite sure what it all means. Every time I dream it, it changes. And it changes even more each time I try to write it down.
Anyway, let me redream it here, for what it's worth. I think of it as a kind of vision, a haunting and puzzling message that I still can't quite decipher. I hope someday I will. Here's how it goes... for the moment, at least, before it changes again :
The Last Battle
a Story in a Form of a Vision

I find myself looking silently through the broken, cobwebbed window of the wooden shack that was my home as a child in North Dakota. It's as if I've been standing here silently for hours, for days, for years, just looking in through this broken window and seeing all the memories come and go, dim shadows barely visible inside the house... Gamma and Gramps, my mother and father, my sisters, all the people who once made up my life...many of them only phantoms now, like myself.
It seems like I've spent centuries just standing there in an almost disembodied state, looking in through this window.
Now I hear the sound of someone crying...a child. It's a moaning cry, like a distant wind on the prairie. A wail of pain, of terror. My heart tightens in my chest. I know that voice. Now the voice stops. Now it starts again. Now, again, finally it stops. Cold silence falls around me, within me.
Of course, the voice is mine, my own voice as a child calling out to me. My lips are frozen. I can't call back, even though I try. I can't answer, I can only listen as that voice fades and returns, fades and returns, like a lonely, faraway prairie wind.
I've come home, but there's no home to come home to. There's only that window, filled with jagged glass and cobwebs. I manage to pull myself away. My body feels enormously heavy. My feet seem me made out of concrete. Each step is an agony. Haunted by emptiness, by memories that refuse to be remembered, I literally pull myself out of my body, which remains standing there at the window even while my real self, my spirit self, wrenches entirely free and flies upward like a swirl of sparks.

Now I find myself on a spirit-walk into this ancient, once-familiar homeland of mine. My feet treat hidden trails my people once walked, long abandoned now, faded reminders of all that once was and will never be again. Again and again I hear that distant crying in the wind.
I come to a riverbank and see squatting there at the water's edge an old indian man with long shining silver hair bound tightly in braids that reach down to his hips. He's aimlessly tossing pebbles into the muddy gray water. Dead and dying fish, turtles, tadpoles lie scattered along the river's banks.
I wonder who this silver-haired Elder is, since over the years I've come to know most of the Elders of our people. He's no one I can remember, and yet there's something strangely familiar about him. As if my thoughts have spoken out loud, he suddenly stands up, turning to face me, and peers with ancient squinting eyes into my mine, seeming to probe my innermost being. Now, with the flicker of a smile on his thin colorless lips, he nods as if he's been expecting me. He raises one hand, gesturing for me to come closer. I do.
As I approach, I see dark tears forming in his vacant eyes, streaming down his face and slowly dripping into the water. Coming closer still, I'm shocked to see those tears are tears of blood !
Now he speaks softly, and his ancient voice has that same weeping of the wind in it.
„My son...My son...” he says in a voice of infinite sadness. And he puts his ghostly like blue hand on my shoulder, peering deep into my soul.
He continues : „I'm an old man, weighted down by years and sorrow. I am the original seed of life, handed down to our people by the Great Spirit. Each of this pebbles I throw out is a lost dream of our people, a dream that sinks and is no more, yet leaves a ripple on the water for all time.
„I am the voice of the Elders of old, now that their voices are stilled. Their voices speak in mine.
„I am the voice of a people, a great nation, bound now in eternal bondage. These tears of blood that flow from my eyes are the blood of the people, the tears of the people, the agony of the people, whose bondage continues to this day.
„I am the voice of Mother Earth herself. And I'm also the voices of those who cry out against her destruction. I am the voice of the Opposition. I am a chorus of millions.
„I speak for those who cannot speak, whose voices have been stilled. Whenever the wind blows or the rain rains on the thunder rumbles, you will hear their voices in my voice. I speak for them.
„And I'm the voice of the Seventh Generation, of those yet to be born, who cry out to us to leave them a world to be born into. Yes, I speak for them, too.”
As he speaks, the wind rises and wails around us like a chorus of ghostly voices. He grasps my shoulder in that blue claw of a hand and shakes me gently, gently as you would wake a child from sleep.
„And, Leonard,” he says, „know this, too. I am your own voice. I speak to you from within yourself. Let the Elders speaks through you. Be a voice for the people. Speak the words I put on your tongue. Send them out to the world. Speak the unspoken so that the deaf may hear. Become a speaker for Earth. Never surrender to silence...”
His clawlike hand releases my shoulder, and I watch as he begins to fade, dissolving into the rising river mist.
I reach out to touch him but there's only empty air where he stood just a moment before.
The ghostly chorus of wind-voices subsides with a last lingering wail.
I'm alone again.
On the riverbank where the Old Man stood lies a small pile of pebbles. Lost hopes. Lost dreams. I'm glad he hadn't throw them all into the water.
I put them in my pocket, and to this day, whenever I take them out and rub them with my fingers, the hopes and dreams of my people come before my inner eye. I think if i could only rub them long and hard enough, that lost world would suddenly come back. Who's to say that other reality isn't as real as this reality we human beings seem so bent on desecrating ? I believe it is. I know I will enter that other reality myself one day in the not so distant future, and all my family and friends and fellow spirit-warriors will be there to greet me. I look forward to that.

I continue my spirit-walk. I feel troubled, angry, disturbed, as I journey through the haunted reservation. As I walk, I notice many of the Great Spirit's creatures lying about motionless, other staggering in deformity, quivering with pain. They make no sound. They have no voice. I weep for them and with them. I give them my voice. I cry out to you now in their voice. As I walk on admidst all that death on every side, I turn my eyes to the sky, searching for the beautiful winged ones who once rode the wind with such grace and vitality. But they, too, are gone. The land, the sky, the water are all dead, lifeless, voiceless. Mother Earth lies barren, voiceless, stuck dumb by the mindless violence unflicted to her and on her children, the indian people.
A dark cloud of black smoke rises within me, a cloud of hatred that chokes me from within. I am choking on my own hate, my own screaming desire for blood vengeance on those who have inflicted these terrible wrongs. My nostrils quiver with anger, with rage.
And now I begin to smell the odor of human flesh burning, a scent so foul that my eyes begin to burn. My heart beats uncontrollably. As the odor of death stings my nostrils, I start to run. Approaching my village, I find only silence where the air was once alive with the laughter of children and the voices of the people. A cold chill runs through me, a terrible loneliness, physically palpable and overwhelming. I feel absolute panic.
I force myself to run toward the first Indian house I see. After entering and stumbling forward a few feet, I freeze. Before me the mutilated bodies of my people - men, women, children -lie strewn on the floor, each in a grotesque pose, eyes open in vacant terror, limbs twisted in their final agony.
I begin to scream, running from house to house in that unholy village. Everywhere the same : twisted, blackened bodies deformed beyond recognition.
Lost and alone, I walk as if in a trance to the center of the village. Then comes a terrifying and overwhelming explosion. My whole body vibrates. I look up into the sky and see a blinding flash of light.
Unable to look any longer, I fall to my knees, blistered and weak. And there upon the ground I see a pool of blood... the Old Man's tears !