Stirred deeper than I realized, my recent visit to the Asian Art Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art conjured unsettling visions and old memories long forgotten. What seemed serene beneath the museum’s quiet lights followed me home, shedding its stillness in the dark. I offer this as a caution: some images do not remain on the wall, and some histories, once awakened, do not easily return to sleep.
Insomnia has a way of thinning the veil. When sleep finally comes, it arrives like a trapdoor giving way beneath the feet. When they deign to visit, my dreams are brief and feral. I do not always remember them, but when I do, they are disquieting.
Years ago in Montreal, three young women from Mumbai flirted with me in an elevator. Silk scarves, dark eyes, and lupine smiles, they invited me to their hotel room. Like me, they were on holiday.
Tempted by the prospect of engaging with adepts in the Kama Sutra, I reluctantly declined, bound to a prior engagement. It was the sort of scene Western Orientalism makes of the exotic—an old male fantasy dressed in sapphire and perfume, worthy of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Delacroix, or Domenico Morelli.
At the time, I was deep into Eastern art and philosophy, and desire felt almost metaphysical.
In the dream, their disappointment turns confrontational. They press against me, pawing and pleading. They try to place consecrated sugar—a hit of acid—on my tongue. The fantasy turns feverish. Something archetypal surfaces, impersonal and merciless. Their movements grow frenzied, ecstatic; their bodies blur and begin to merge into a single six-armed temptress.
I begin to yield, drawn toward surrender like William Savage among the Thuggees in the cult classic film The Deceivers (1988).
Then, in a flash of cold lucidity, I turn on them. With sudden, inexplicable force, I cast them into the dark elevator shaft—the Abyss.
I wake before they reach the bottom.
Sleep does not return.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, March 7th, Feast of San Tommaso D'Aquino
