Practical knowledge.
I've told this story so many times that I wouldn't dream of testifying for its accuracy. The facts, even from the beginning, were tenuous at best--which makes my memory of the red bridge a perfect starting point for this project.
I am six, and traveling to the city for the first time. I am contrasting glass and steel with barkdust piles and pine needles as the bridges, waters, and miles of gray concrete unfold before me and all about my periphery. I feel small. These stark urban elements slowly give way to shady avenues as I careen upward through a canopy rising from the perimeter of the city, and soon enough the landscape is natural, though measured.
My mother and I chat, and take it all in. We get out of the car and begin walking.
The gravel paths are different here--so manicured and lifeless. Quiet. I step gingerly across hexagonal stones, and am impressed by the tigress and her cubs posted amidst the rockery. I think about paths, and decide that they are sometimes broad and well-traveled, but then sometimes they are narrow, sinewy, and hidden. I am on the latter kind, trying to keep my toes out of the puddles which gather around root and stone, and collect in the mosses.
Again, the scenery changes. I've come out of the garden and into a wide field of cropped grass. Crackling rivulets gush amid drifting wood and wildflowers, carving out a map on the emerald turf. It is more water than land here, and the only image that doesn't list into the hazy borders of my memory is the magnificent red bridge, which arches like a benevolent monarch over several of the more substantial streams. I want to climb it, but I don't. I have no substance.
In my dreams, and memory, I have no substance.
Years later, my mother will have remembered our first trip to the Japanese Gardens in Portland. She'll remember the city painted on my face, the roads to the forest, the pathways and the tigress. She will be able to recall it much better than I, but the red bridge is conspicuously absent from her recollections. I will emphatically defend the existence of the bridge, and she, in her gentle, trustful way, will rebuke it. I will visit the gardens many times, and will search for it before finally, practically, I will doubt that it was ever there.
Mystical Knowledge.
Today, as I was staring up at the clouds waiting for the light to change (and eating an apple), a great, tall man with a grey beard approached, and I had the fleeting sensation that I knew him. I did. It was a beloved university professor of mine from years past, whom I had taken many classes from. We talked about our families and plans, and I told him that I had been thinking of him lately, because of a sheet of paper discovered in the pages of a book which belonged to me. On the sheet was printed one of the stories from the One Thousand and One Nights, which I fervently believe came from this university professor of mine. It's just the sort of thing he would have given me. Anyway, the story is significant not because it is unaccompanied by any of the other entertainments, but because of the complexity hidden behind the relatively simple narrative:
A wealthy man--a Baghdadi--has lost everything, and is forced into a life of hard labor. Speaker comes to him in a dream and urges him to Cairo, for a great fortune awaits him there. With nothing to lose, the man sets out to claim his fortune. He arrives in Cairo just as evening overtakes the desert, and decides to rest for the night in a mosque. Meanwhile, Allah decrees that a band of thieves enter the mosque and begin making arrangements to rob the adjoining estate. The Chief of Police, privy to the plans, shows up, but too late--the bandits make off with their loot, and escape persecution. Naturally, the law finds the Baghdadi asleep in the mosque and erroneously assumes the worst. The Baghdadi is cane-whipped within an inch of his life. Beaten and confused, the Baghdadi is sent to jail for three days, after which the Chief questions him and ascertains the truth. Laughing hard enough to "show his wisdom teeth," the Chief admits that he, himself, had been visited by Speaker three times, and had been promised that a great treasure lay hidden under such-and-such jetting fountain in such-and-such garden in Baghdad, only he wasn't fool enough to make the journey on the confidence of a dream. Whereupon, the Chief gives the Baghdadi some coins and sends him back to Baghdad.
We are always navigating controlled environments which we have no hand in. It is preposterous to think that we have control, yet we spend our whole lives asserting this fallacy and claiming ownership, creating symbols, and determining meaning. Our stories are perhaps the most artificial, misleading documents of our existence, but perhaps not? Perhaps they contain the only fragments of truth we know. My effervescent bridge is fixed solidly in my memory where it spans arterial canals eternally. If I were to stand upon its gleaming, brocaded surface, squinting my eyes against the immense convergence of light that swallows me there, I will have discovered the headwaters of my many fictions.
Even though Shahrazad concludes her story for the evening with the Baghdadi's departure from Cairo (in order to retain her head for one more day), King Shahryar must have divined the ending: In the Police Chief's dream the Baghdadi recognizes his own garden, his own jetting fountain, and returns home to dig up riches beyond his imagination. After all, this is story. And in Northern Ireland, thousands of miles from Portland, I discovered the red bridge many years later, in a wide field of cropped grass.
