I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin’ him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it.
But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin’. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
And then I woke up.
- Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country for Old Men
Or said another way...
There's this myth that we all know. In the myth, which was conceived in each of us while in the primal and utter unconsciousness of our mothers wombs, we know, however fleetingly, the possibility of total connection with another human being. It is the oldest myth, and the most painful, and has found purchase in an old forest surrounded by desert on one side, mountain on the other, grassy plains on the third side, and the sea on the last. The presence of this idea has existed for so long and is of such a demanding nature that a thousand human generations have erected statue after statue to honor it. In the mossy forests and sandy seas where this myth dwells, these statues loom like indifferent sentinels, describing the singular ambition of every man and woman who has deigned glance in the direction of these lost places. The most ancient of these statues have long since worn away and are little more than malformed lumps of stone now. The newest ones, right now being built, and shining with youth's optimism, are themselves certainly destined to be nothing more than forgotten and shapeless relics. This is their real purpose though, and is the heart of the myth's purpose. For in returning to a shapeless state, these stone testaments become part of the whole once again... no longer unique, no longer individual, no longer alone. All things in time become one with the garden and the sands and waters, and the promise made to us before our birth is realized again in the demise and decay of our individuality.
Of course this all just a myth too, for there is no garden or endless sea of sand nor any looming statues, except what whimsy and imagination allow. These vanishing places only dissolve because we want them too. They are, truly, beholden to the shapes demanded of them, being as they are only the stuff of dreams and therefore not stuff at all. But every story ever told is about this place, each tale an edifice upon the garden's landscape, and each is in it's own way a faded empire, a sprawling and ambitious idea unrelenting in it's need to be acknowledged and limited only by it's failure to be real.
I'm not old enough to have woken up yet, like Sheriff Bell, which is why I built this site. So while I dream, I plan to build some statues of my own. Maybe you'll pass a few and take notice as you stroll through the garden. And maybe, briefly, you'll sense that old and perfect bond between people, which is the truest feeling in all the world... even though it is just a story.
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