Visions As Metaphors

The first day of the workshop was a disaster, scary even. The program was loose, unstructured, the emphasis on volume of output, ideas flowing, torrents with no analytical thought. After all I’d been through in the last few years, the workshop’s buzz phrases—stream of consciousness creation, enhanced intimacy with thoughts and emotions—should have triggered my alarms. I had taken a damn bus all the way from the city to somewhere in New Jersey, slept on a mat on a distant friend’s kitchen floor, and the next morning, gone to class. The teacher was good, I’ll give her that, but I doubted she’d ever worked with someone like me. She began the class with simple instructions that described the process as brain to pencil and paper, no erasing allowed. I understood the point of the it, we were supposed to allow ourselves to enter a process of write now edit later taken to an extreme, but I couldn’t find the tools to loosen my creative clogs. I tried slapping down unrelated words on different parts of the blank paper and even drew rough illustrations with words randomly floating through them. I struggled the entire day, and ended so discouraged that I planned on going back to the city the next morning.

But I didn’t. I persuaded myself to give the class another go. When I arrived, the fourteen other students were already there, cross-legged on the carpeted floor, sprawled on the few couches, or sitting in upright chairs at hard-top tables, all with pencils clutched in their hands and fat notebooks in front of them. I took a seat on a couch between two middle-aged women, closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and broke into a vision of sorts. Unlike most of my early experiences, this one came on slow and gentle, like a happy dream. It started with the woman to my right. Her frustration was similar to mine, I could feel it all over me, and within a minute the feeling enlarged to include a clear visual image of her inside a shimmery bubble. She poked at the clear curves, her finger tips mounding the surfaces, unable to break through. The image expanded to an overhead view of the entire group, with most of the class already fully engaged in the process, streaks of color flowing down their arms, through their hands and pencils and onto the paper. I saw three other bubbles, their captives trapped, unable to activate their own colors—and I was one of them. The film shimmered around me and then evaporated and the vision stopped. My excitement surged, and a clarity about the whole process seemed to form inside me. Even a name showed up, Visions as Metaphors, giving the exercise a deep personal meaning. Visions I’d had in earlier years—fields burning, meeting famous people, summiting mountains—began to take on clarity. An explanation presented itself because, in my real life, the events never actually happened. Not once, not ever. For the rest of that day and the next, I scrawled and scribbled, starting with a detailed account of my first experience, standing on a riverbank at the base of a large concrete dam. A warm sun brightened the day, a few young ones stood on river rocks, the drizzle from above tickling their toes, and birds swooped and chattered. All was sweet until the vision switch snapped on: blackened sky, frigid wind, vultures screeching, the smell of dirty floodwater as it cracked through the massive gray wall. It lasted five minutes, and five years later, the dam still held, strong and mighty, symbolic of something I didn’t yet understand.

A few days later, I boarded a bus for the trip back to the city. I sat with my pencil and notebook out and found that the motion of the bus, the anonymity and the forced lack of anything else to do, were a perfect combination for more insight and inspiration. I imagined travelling a long distance, maybe to Florida or across the country, and writing for much of the trip. I planned for some future day.

About a half hour from the city, we made a stop and a few more passengers climbed on. An older man maybe my grandfather’s age sat next to me, introduced himself as Benny, and shook my hand.

“And your name?” he asked.

“Uh, Andrew. Andrew Delisle.”

He saw my closed notebook, the cardboard cover bulged up by a pencil inside. “What’s that you’re working on there, Andrew? It looks interesting.”

I opened a little bit, not completely, and told him about the writing workshop. He was a practiced listener and nodded along, never interrupting, and I almost went all the way, almost described the visions. But I didn’t.

When I finished, he said, “What you’re doing is wonderful, Andrew. There’s nothing like creativity to fuel the soul, especially for a young man like yourself. Stay with it and I’m sure it will take you somewhere good. Now, let’s enjoy the beautiful day. The view is coming shortly and I always love it.

The bus began to wind its way around the long circular approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, prepping us for the dive under the Hudson River. I knew the view Benny was talking about. He was right, it was always magnificent. But not this time. Bright flames lit up the choppy earth where the towers should have been and a cloud of thick smoke blackened the sky. For a moment, I felt as if my body left the bus and moved in so close that I could even hear the screams and breathe the sickly dust.

Benny said, “You know? I never get tired of seeing it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it.”

When I realized what was happening, I wanted to scream. It was so predictable that nobody had seen what I saw. Of course, they hadn’t. I was so sick of it all. Flashes of each of my visions flipped in front of me like a nineteen-twenties movie. None of it was real, it was only something my disturbed mind had made up. And there it was, one more time. But then, as the bus descended into the confines of the Lincoln Tunnel, rushing past the tiled walls and concrete walkways, my outlook shifted to my new wonderful explanation of visions—here was one more glorious metaphor, the best one ever.