dream tiger / space lion

Better get another coal on the fake fire
Cover on the wet tiles

(The Maccabees)

back when they ran a soup restaurant in a small side street of Seoul and eight out of ten of their customers were strays, and they would have this little thing between each other where on some evenings they would see who could eat more of the really hot spice mixture, just spooning it in between gulps of water (50 cl of plain mineral water were allowed each), and on one of those evenings they went pretty far with it, and outside it rained because it was the end of August or maybe the beginning of September, and one of them slept like a baby afterwards and the other one had trouble sleeping because of all the heavy and hot food in their stomach, and in their unstable sleep they would dream of a strange kind of tiger, and in the morning they got up, the early air cool on their sweaty skin, and they made a drawing of the dream tiger, sitting at the bar of their little restaurant and drawing with both hands, and it would look like this

and back when in Southern France, they had had just maybe perhaps a tiny little bit too much rosé with lunch and the hot sun did and did not help at the same time, and the buzzing of the bees in the lavender bushes and the pockets of damp air between the olive trees and dark spikes of pine, and they were happy to enter Maeght's rooms and their endless cool, and their eyes took the plunge into Monory's dream tiger no. 4 like four sunburnt tourists take the plunge into the hotel swimming pool, what with Rilke and climate change and everything, what with the Mountains of Madness

and back when deep in the entrails of an underground dance slash fetish club in NYC, they had to take a break from the bass and the dancing (and the drugs!), or maybe they simply had to take a leak (both at the same time!), anyway, they went into the restrooms and there, in the black corridor that led to the restrooms, illuminated by the faintest of lights coming half from the toilets, half from the club, someone had plastered Hokusai's Tiger in the Snow onto the wall (a reproduction, of course!), and it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen, and then they went back onto the dancefloor but now it was different, now there was an endless sky-plain of cold snow extending into all (yes, all!) directions, very much like this

and when, much later, they got up in a Paris hotel room, the early air cool on their sweaty skin, snow on the many roofs outside, the dark spike of Tour Montparnasse in the distance, and they looked at each other and at the mild, ever so slightly controlled chaos of that hotel room, and they turned on the TV and they heard about those travelers, tourists no doubt, who got lost in the Himalayas of Northern India, and how only one of them could be saved, and how that tourist swore on his life and on the life of Jesus Christ (whose buried body they were looking for, he claimed, all the way up in the Himalayas, where the son of god was supposedly buried under a false name, in a false tomb, on a false plateau), that they had reached that false plateau, and had marched through the false snow, and that they had encountered what he called the dream tiger and that it had devoured everyone but him, and they asked him why he had been spared, and he answered because he could run the fastest, and he said that the tiger was a false tiger, and that it looked like this, and he held up a drawing he had made of it and it looked like this

and of course there was the time when they barely knew each other and when they happened to occupy neighboring seats at a university lecture, and it was on Borges, an author they both disliked, on his Dreamtigers, a collection of the texts that, the professor informed the audience, belonged inevitably to the best of the Western canon, that even Harold Bloom had deemed it an indispensable literary treasure, and that Borges himself had called it his most personal work, and they had read the namesake text within the book, and another text, entitled "The Other Tiger", and they had found the latter cheap and the former cheap and misogynistic.

and later they were living in Baja California selling surf equipment although neither of them had ever really surfed, but they liked the smell of the boards and the suits, and of the sunscreen and the salt, and all over the coast people were speaking of a surfer of almost mythical quality, unsurpassable prowess, infinite elegance and bottomless courage, and people were calling her the dream tiger because allegedly she had the line "voy a causar un tigre" – I am going to cause a tiger – tattooed on her underarm, which they both realized was a Borges quote, and because there was a huge and colorful drawing on her surfboard, a drawing that looked like this

and when they were renovating that farm house somewhere south of Kraków, on a meadow near a forest, and it was a marvellous, mild Autumn, and they were getting rid of the lead paint and sanding and waxing the beautiful heavy floorboards, and the sunlight fell in through the windows and they drank cold fountain water and looked at their work, the air cool on their sweaty brows, and they were talking to each other about how they would invite all their friends, and have a three-day party, and how their friends would like it so much that they would stay and live with them, just the best ones, the ones closest to their hearts, and they would sit on the veranda and maybe start smoking pipes full of sweet tobacco, and there would be children and dogs and cats and hens running about everywhere, it would be chaos but comfortable chaos, honey-like, dripping from the walls and from that magical attic where they planned to have something like an old-fashioned home cinema with a projector and everything, and show films they loved, and they would be able to open the freshly installed attic windows and let the night breeze in, and it would be lovely, and they realized they were building a dream home and it would house a dream tiger, and they would encounter it, in the night time, in the black corridor that led to the bahtroom, and it would look like this

or, really, when they were seeing the dream tiger eyes open, eyes closed, and they felt they were done with something. tired. exhausted. and felt that when they talked to each other the words would not come out right and taste of tar. and one of them felt that there was almost no jungle left and only the tiger remained. and the other felt that there was almost no tiger left and only jungle remained. and one of them thought that the dream tiger was tied down by the long black stripes, like by some sort of parasite, and that the tiger was unable to get rid of it. and the other thought that the dream tiger was only visited by the black stripes and that they could desert it, that one day the stripes could be gone and the tiger would be helpless and false. and one of them said that the tiger was menacing. and the other said that the tiger was protecting. and one of them said that the tiger was their dream. and the other said they were the tiger's dream.

and they got disgusted by their symmetry, and one of them went to a small town on some Norwegian fjord, and one of them went to Buenos Aires and lived in a small apartment in the Mataderos district overlooking a market.

and the one who lived on the fjord looked at the eternally overcast ocean and thought about opening a small restaurant serving a few select Korean dishes, and pondered the readiness of the Norwegian palate, but thought, well, it's 2037, all palates might be ready for everything, and really it was about time to earn money again because life in Norway was wildly expensive.

and the one who lived in Buenos Aires looked at the bustling little market in front of the apartment, smoked a cigarette at the kitchen window and thought about writing a book, a small novel, a novella, a novelette, whatever the difference between the latter two was. Who knew? And it would be about everything but tigers.

and the one who lived on the fjord stopped looking at the eternally overcast ocean and moved down to Oslo, and there opened up a small restaurant serving a few select Korean dishes, and to maybe gamble, metaphysically, for a bit of luck with this adventure, chose to call it Dream Tiger, and even drew a mascot and pinned it onto the dining room wall and it looked like this

while the one in Buenos Aires chose a favorite bench down on the market plaza and wrote, not a novel, not a novella, not a novelette – because, really, who knew the difference between all three of those? – but a translation of a text that looked somewhat liked this

Pienso en un tigre. La penumbra exalta
La vasta Biblioteca laboriosa
Y parece alejar los anaqueles;
Fuerte, inocente, ensangrentado y nuevo,
él irá por su selva y su mañana
Y marcará su rastro en la limosa
Margen de un río cuyo nombre ignora
(En su mundo no hay nombres ni pasado
Ni porvenir, sólo un instante cierto.)
Y salvará las bárbaras distancias
Y husmeará en el trenzado laberinto
De los olores el olor del alba
Y el olor deleitable del venado;
Entre las rayas del bambú descifro,
Sus rayas y presiento la osatura
Baja la piel espléndida que vibra.
En vano se interponen los convexos
Mares y los desiertos del planeta;
Desde esta casa de un remoto puerto
De América del Sur, te sigo y sueño,
Oh tigre de las márgenes del Ganges.

Al tigre de los simbolos he opuesto
El verdadero, el de caliente sangre,
El que diezma la tribu de los búfalos
Y hoy, 3 de agosto del 59,
Alarga en la pradera una pausada
Sombra, pero ya el hecho de nombrarlo
Y de conjeturar su circunstancia
Lo hace ficción del arte y no criatura
Viviente de las que andan por la tierra.

Un tercer tigre buscaremos. Éste
Será como los otros una forma
De mi sueño, un sistema de palabras
Humanas y no el tigre vertebrado
Que, más allá de las mitologías,
Pisa la tierra. Bien lo sé, pero algo
Me impone esta aventura indefinida,
Insensata y antigua, y persevero
En buscar por el tiempo de la tarde
El otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.

and as there was no Spanish dictionary sold on that market plaza, and the original was remembered only from an already ancient-seeming university course, the translation looked like this

I think of a tiger. The penumbra makes
The vast and busy city grand
And pushes the houses back;
Strong, untouchable, covered in blood and new,
It will move through its jungle and its morning
And will print its tracks on the muddy
Banks of a river whose name it does not know
(In its world there are no names nor past
Nor time to come, only the fixed moment)
And will leap across barbarous distances
And will scent out from the woven maze
Of all the scents, the scent of dawn:
And the pleasant scent of deer.
Between the stripes of the bamboo I recognize
Its stripes and have the feel of the bony structure
That quivers under the glowing skin.
In vain try the curving seas to impede
And the deserts of the planet;
On this market place in a far-off metropolis
In South America, I pursue and dream you,
O tiger on the Ganges’ banks.

In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect
That the tiger invoked in my verse
Is a ghost of a tiger, a symbol,
A series of literary tropes and old videos
And memories from wikipedia
And not the deadly tiger, the fateful jewel
That, under the sun or the varying moon,
In Sumatra or Bengal went on fulfilling
Its rounds of love, of idleness and death.

To the symbolic tiger I have opposed
The real thing, full with hot blood
Almost driven to extinction.
And today, on the third of August 2037,
There stretches on the grass a certain
Shadow, but already the fact of naming it
And conjecturing its constellations
Makes it a figment of art and no creature
Living among those that walked the earth.

We shall seek a third tiger. This
Will be like those others a shape
Of my dreaming, a system of words
Humans make and not the vertebrate tiger
That, beyond the mythologies,
Was treading the earth. I know well enough
That something lays on me this quest
Undefined, raw and ancient, and I go on
Seeking through the afternoon time
The other tiger, that which is not in verse.

and this was about tigers after all, but this was really because the one who lived in Buenos Aires had found a lover, someone who lived just three blocks down and who frequented the market on the plaza the apartment overlooked, and the lover worked at the Universidad. A sinologist. And when the one who lived in Buenos Aires visited the lover at home in that apartment just three blocks down, there would hang, in the small damp bedroom, a print of a scroll that the lover insisted was in fact very, very old, and it looked like this

and the one who lived in Buenos Aires accepted that this scroll was, in fact, very, very old, and did not mind it, except that it was kind of difficult to have sex while that thing stared at you, and anyway, how to see that tiger and not think of the one who lived in Oslo?

except the one who lived in Oslo no longer lived in Oslo because it turned out the Norwegian palate was not prepared. So the one who had left for the fjord and then moved to Oslo moved to Sicily, but this was really because the one who had lived in Oslo had found a lover, someone who normally lived in Southern Italy and happened to be in Norway only for a conference. The family of the lover was in the lemon business, and they had those farms some kilometres west of Catania, and the one who had left for the fjord lived on the farm and helped out, and the lemons were very hard and very yellow and the Mediterranean sky pale with Winter. And it was a peaceful and beautiful month and then another, and Winter moved into Spring, and the one who now lived near Catania sometimes thought that it would be nice if the one who lived in Buenos Aires would come and live near Catania, too, in the farmhouse overlooking the largest of the lemon groves as it extended all the way to the dark spikes of the pines and then to the orange line of the horizon behind them, that it would be nice if the one who lived in Buenos Aires would simply be there in the morning and all through the day and the night, would see the lemon groves, too, the yellow glow deep inside the greenery, the way that glow could seem blueish beneath the layer of frost during that one sub-zero night lemons needed to become really ripe. The one who now lived near Catania thought that the one who lived in Buenos Aires would look very beautiful standing on the veranda, and that they would have spice challenges in the evening, and, together with the lover of the one who now lived in Catania, they would have a cat, and the cat would haunt the farm and never hurt a single bird, and it would look like this

and the one who lived in Buenos Aires returned fully to politics, got into organizations. Contributed leaflets, social media posts. Participated in demonstrations, sit-ins, talks, finally sabotage acts. Became an important voice within two discourses that, strenuously and painfully, shred through Argentinian society: the gradual dismantling of the meat industry and the fight against femicide. The one who lived in Buenos Aires helped organize international meetings, spoke on plazas, spoke on avenidas, spoke on podcasts. Thought about the Maeght Monory, thought about Antarctica slowly turning green some latitudes South, thought about the Mountains of Madness. Received death threats, suffered assaults – including, once, getting splashed with animal blood. Helped sabotage the second-largest slaughterhouse in Latin America. And when the nocturnal air was dark and lush and cool about Buenos Aires, open with promise and life, existence began to feel a bit like this

and the one who lived in Buenos Aires overheard, at one of the public gatherings at the Universidad, a Wiccan eco-feminist explain the concept of a tulpa. A tulpa, the Wiccan said, was a being brought into material existence by sheer power of concentration – a willed thought-form that is able to gain full indepence from its tulpamancer. 'Concentration', the Wiccan continued, could be intentional, but also exacted by the shared unconscious: in any way, the tulpa arises at some location within an affective landscape, as an expression of enormous conscious or unconscious will. And the one who lived in Buenos Aires was happy that the discussion went elsewhere after that, because there had been a disastrous oil spill just off the tierra del fuego coast, and the web was ablaze with images of the long black ribbons cutting through the ocean foam, as if tying down the waves, but here, finally, the top brass of several consortia had done a mistake and it was possible to place the blame and the legal responsibility with some precision. And the Argentine population was openly angry. Thus, in the stuffy air of the party building room, there lingered the possibility of a great precedent, and the one who lived in Buenos Aires was head-bent on seizing it, watching the footage of the dark oil lines over and over again like a visual mantra.

and so one decade spilled over into the next and then into the one after that. And the one who had spent half of childhood reading Calvin & Hobbes again and again eventually bought an apartment in Buenos Aires, a different one, overlooking the port. And the one who had had, as a child, a striped pyjama, established a tradition of cooking really hot Korean food once a month. And the one who would, eventually, die of a heart attack in the midst of haggling about the prize of a bag of bell peppers, started writing a novel, or maybe a novella or a novelette, but never finished it. and only the lover, the sinologist, ever read the manuscript, and agreed that it was not very good. And the one who would, eventually, die in a car crash a few kilometers south of Naples on an unspeakably bright afternoon, seriously took to playing chess on the veranda while overlooking the ripening lemons, all yellow and intense in the shade of the grove. and the lover, the citrus dynasty heir, lost every single time and loved every single defeat.

but at one instance in their lives, they both dreamed of the tiger as it sped through some infinite space, through some false snow or across some true plateau, its footfall faster than coincidence, and it looked like this