JOHN M. GANIARD / 4 entries from JAY CUTLER
THE QUARTERBACK
I don't know what kind of dream this is. Every dream is a dream of decline. The decline of the dream itself, the way a balloon bursts in a rapid shrinking back from the point of rupture. When viewed at an incredibly high frame rate, I mean. Every dream ends with the backstage curtain failing and falling in a single wave, slow and awkward, confusing the actors on stage. Here there are just hazard lights, then blue and red police bars, then yellow tow bars, each diminishing after each, into a far distance, all in a whirling snowfall itself diminishing into the same. Decline as in grace. Waxed paper blowing through the stadia. Instead of "Science" I read the headline as "The Incredible Silence Behind Starling Murmurations," which there maybe also is. Brief snowless darkness, then an outcropping of false boyhood memories beside tranquil Crater Lake. "The firing is confined to the stress conditioned pathways in the brain," I said tonight while swallowing, pacing the breadth of light from the TV, imagining comfort in the looming off-season, temporary release from belief. I don't know what kind of dreams the insulin brings, though it surely brings them—a house call doctor, black and wide-brimmed hat in his hands, gas masked. And yes, as always before a dream begins, I am briefly awakened by the sensation of having just tripped, the hypnic jerk, the false start of the sleep cycle which presages in itself every dream’s decline.
That is, a picture I once looked up of tranquil Crater Lake has, here in the dream, superimposed itself upon or reconstituted itself within the memory of three separate swimming pools from childhood. Presumably behind anything is a silence. Community pool, club pool, university pool, together down in the basin, encircled by forested ridgeline. Hypnic jerks occur at random in otherwise healthy individuals and chronically in sufferers of sleep anxiety. Think of a simple index for the generic Midwest pool area: chlorine smell, bleach smell; hot dog smell, or vending machine whir; voices echoing in the showers and changing rooms, the white hot pavement, your vision chemically fogged and desaturated. This dream is then some real event, lost—truth trying to fire up again in the imagination, failing. Now held under water, now slapped by pool noodle against the cheek and brow from all those years ago and, in the dream’s way, here again. From where were these faces sourced. Decline meaning, quite literally, a bending down.
And yes I read of the miniature Argentine La Plata dolphin dozens of excited beach-goers, seeking photographs, handled and then abandoned to die in the late afternoon sun. Some parables, like dreams, lack a discernible lesson. “If anything this news photographer could have intervened,” read a comment posted below the article, “I understand we are to be outraged but no care to address this photographer who found it acceptable to photograph this poor creature as it died?” How a dream can make foundational otherwise easily forgotten though nonetheless at-the-time existence-withering events of social embarrassment. Embarrassment at being shown, at being revealed to the world—half-nude, rube-like, consternated, filled with ineffectual aggression. Some suggest the dolphin was already dead. With regard to the urge to annihilate one’s neighbor, many of our upbringings amounted to the suggestion that we sublimate the desire for its immediacy into an acceptance of its immanency. Consider all of the small punishments of one’s leisure; consider them as, after all, deserved.
(So this image, lifted from the televised broadcast, where the subject of the camera, the subject of the research, is recurring within the immense stadium screen he is situated in front of, as when one is situated between two mirrors, is an example of what’s called video feedback, or the Droste effect or mise en abyme. What’s more, if there is a final, terminal recursion to a video feedback loop it is lost to us, and in the context of a mass sporting event I am calling this instance of the phenomenon the Jumbotron Edith, you know, digital salt, be it the Chicago quarterback himself or the American flag during the Air Force flyover, and I want to ask—does anything lie beyond the furthest visible recursion? unto what plane does said nth recurred subject transcend unto? A threshold or horror or like a point of pure light from which, inevitably, there is no reporting back from?)
This pool dream is new, and rare, and perhaps never to be repeated. The committee members begin their statements with introductory clauses like “on the level of basic orthography,” or “with particular regard to parallelism.” The dream I most often have is of being back in high school as my present-day self, having recently discovered I did not graduate due to a technicality. In each iteration of the dream I cannot recall which class I am to go to each period, or what the current period is (having arrived late), and I am too terrified to go to the office to ask for a duplicate copy of my class schedule and I do not know my locker combination. Then some wrong turn reveals, retreating prismatically, a darkening succession of shower stalls. Of course, within a dream you are the only actor who can become self-aware and knowingly wait for the artifice, the dream architecture, the curtain, to collapse. The committee will uniformly speak in the subjunctive mood. At a bar shortly before the wedding of a high school friend I discovered that my recurrent dream, in near exact detail, was shared by the groom and two of the three former high school classmates present at the table. The tedium, the gentlest precarity. What kind of dream, in the cultural estimation, is any dream, anyway, now that we’ve fairly dispensed with divination. Consider the pool as dream venue just a dumb, logical development from the pool as a staging ground for its own mnemonic imprint, where perhaps it was flagged for its potential as a useful and quick-booting bit of dream software. They will withhold your funding, the committee. What do we tend to collectively say happens after the dream, other than that we reflect upon its occurrence. Even your friends that are into astrology will seem not so much into serious divination, serious divinatory codices. Decline, where nothing is near at hand.
I’ve just had the one pool dream: this one, the Crater Lake Dream, now cut with establishment shots like Nickelodeon shows, outsizing itself with fake studio audience applause, DARPA operators in the staging room, arm-patches depicting Morpheus, Phobetor, and Phantasos. And yes I am watching this now from outside my child body, away from the infliction, from everywhere but also from here, leaning on the basin rim, waiting for the double doors to spring open and for little me in trunks to appear, hyperventilating, hurt, a woeful sax and synth combo playing over my dejected exit from these facilities. Little trapper keeper designs will now dance in the corners of the screen. What kind of dreams is this, where I am to be sent on some kind of mission.
AFTER THE QUARTERBACK’S NEW COACH DECIDES TO RUN THE PLAY IN WHICH THE QUARTERBACK SPLITS OUT WIDE AS A DECOY IN THE WILDCAT FORMATION
It’s not an interesting question, but I didn’t understand—how, when the console ejected the disc, the players were still visible on the screen, breathing.
AFTER THE QUARTERBACK LEAVES A SIGNIFICANTLY LONG LINE FOR THE BATHROOM AT THE GALLERY OPENING FOR HIS WIFE’S FRIEND AND DECIDES TO PEE OUTSIDE IN AN ALLEY
He cannot find his wife and is close enough to the coat room that it seems foolish, given the delicate timing, to continue to try. It is raining what is called a wintry mix, and so once outside he flips up the collar of his overcoat and tightens his scarf and bows his head and then pats his breast, habitually searching for the cigarettes that are not there, defeating his ulterior motive. He finds the ideal area, between a dumpster and a trash bin, though still in full view of the street. He trusts it doesn’t matter. The earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep. To get himself to go, he thinks without language of the site of an active tick encounter, for instance on the dogs after a hunt on the property. Black obelisks installed in an expanse of blue-grey flesh. Pathogenesis vs. Pathophysiology, he had searched on his phone, in the car. The subject is micturating normally and without pain his doctor would say. Untraceable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are spiking briefly in the drinking water. Rainbows of miscible ether, as from gasoline components, bloom against the curb, slipping out of beautiful and delicate patterns and down the storm drain. Soils are likely contaminated with lead for hundreds of square blocks. He thinks of alleys in Nashville, where, much drunker, he perfected this practice. He focuses to prevent attenuation. The Laurentide Ice Sheet is slowly returning as a disbursement of plastics, rare metals, and solvents. Returning as rain already in this early spring in the alley, as days of bomb cyclonic rain in a future so close at hand it eclipses the detail of this present, catalyzing harmful fungal root growth in crops outside of Niobrara, Nebraska, outside of Hamburg, Iowa, and turning high yield plots in the floodplains into mud pits. Trace amounts of plastics are in his piss already, in his blood. Eighty-eight pounds of plastic pouring out of the gutted whale. And God’s breath over the water. He thinks of the art upstairs, all vague, neutral color. The horrors of modernity, the dead in the Somme, the mechanized slaughter, etc.. That was what art, he had read or been told or wrote in another throwaway class at Vanderbilt, the one comprising rote memorizations of paintings, years, and European names, was responding to. He thinks about the word lesson, but only as a series of phonemes. In a future so close at hand it eclipses the detail of this present he will scan, online, an article someone will share about how the recent shows, produced by the streaming service—the long-running show about the depressed horse, the new show remaking the markedly American existentialisms of a beloved Bill Murray film for a generation of terminal freelancers—“seem to be taking their cues from educational children’s TV.” He will never visit or hear of Wizardchan, an online imageboard expressly for American, far-right “adult male virgins” who, in the /depression/ sub-board, confessed to how their overwhelming ideation was made worse by either their inability to afford treatment or their difficulty securing specialist referrals through their HMOs. Within a dormant silo, the surface grain will often crust over a void. He maintains the kingdom of the self, the walls white and inviolate. In a future far enough away to sound like prophecy the ocean conveyor belt stops, supremacist militias form and colonize abandoned malls. A humpback whale has already appeared mysteriously in a clearing in the heart of the Amazon. People walk by the alley and do not see him. There’s a commotion and he leans slightly back to see a man in his official McDonald’s cubicle-grey polo assaulting a slimmer man in a large ill-fitting black winter coat, pushing him up against a window, throwing wild and likely ineffective punches. The whole encounter is muffled by a passing train overhead and difficult not to treat with detachment, to assume the two men know each other, going by the dispassionate expressions of fellow employees watching silently from inside the now-closed seating area. Visible exhalations of breath from the two slowly tiring men alternate, rhythmically. Reconstructionists, postmillennialists, Catholic monarchists, and Templar revivalists are coming online to fantasize their rise within a new dark age, offline, several decades away. In a future struggling to be described within its present, the platform’s machine learning processes no longer differentiate between content to suppress and content critical to core growth strategies. Historic trout fishing rivers in west Michigan run “ink black” with concentrated animal shit. It takes only two to three seconds to become helpless in flowing grain. He is not having a prophetic and apocalyptic vision of the future because he’s nearly done peeing and his parasympathetic nervous system is reflexively lowering his blood pressure and triggering a release of catecholamines into his bloodstream, inducing something like pleasure. And so the tick leaves his mind, replaced by the image of a hotel bed, newly made, or the ball falling forever into the outstretched arms of the Y receiver in a finely executed crossing route, or the memory of an infinitely looping video his wife showed him yesterday of a woman gleefully critiquing the kerning on a Del Taco sign, sing-songily yelling fr-e sh-a vaca-do. Joy, finally, was never and will never be withheld. My father is seeing Cream live in the Grande Ballroom on December 22nd, 1967. I am in a finished basement dancing to Paul Simon’s “Can’t Run But,” age 6, May 19th, 1994. In a future so close at hand its antecedent transmissions course through the medium of space at the very moment he leaves the alley, scientists analyzing data sent back by the Messenger satellite will discover that Mercury’s dark surface is the result of an exposed graphite crust, the remnant of a long burned-away, once totalizing ocean of liquid magma, kicked up and revealed by generations of meteorite strikes and geologic events as the planet continued, as it had for millions of years, to contract upon itself. My last six brain cells, he’ll recollect, years from now, years from the faint smell of cleaning supplies in the elevator as he returns to the soft and horribly comforting din of music and polite conversation in the loft gallery, as he hangs his coat back up, as he feels a tug at his elbow. What my last six brain cells look like when... he’ll think and chuckle, following the dogs along the fence back up the hill and away from the contractors piling the remainder of the sandbags, as a wall cloud too early for the season drops into the clear sky above him.
AFTER THE QUARTERBACK LOSES; HEINZ FIELD, PITTSBURGH
He thought of the American flag though it wasn’t, any longer, a quadrant of anxiogenic stars on a field of stripes, but a cross of gold, centered and set against black. The train whistle on the jumbotron looked like a big brass cock, steaming. Everybody on the sidelines joked about it.
Notes: The lines "The earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep" and “God’s breath over the water” are taken directly from Robert Altar’s translation of The Book of Genesis from The Five Books of Moses (W.W. Norton, 2008).
John M. Ganiard received an MFA from the University of Michigan. He lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.