“Cheshire Cat: If I were looking for a white rabbit, I’d ask the Mad Hatter.
Alice: The Mad Hatter? Oh, no no no…
Cheshire Cat: Or, you could ask the March Hare, in that direction.
Alice: Oh, thank you. I think I’ll see him…
Cheshire Cat: Of course, he’s mad, too.
Alice: But I don’t want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you can’t help that. Most everyone’s mad here.

Laughs maniacally, starts to disappear.

Cheshire Cat: You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself.”

― From the animated film, based on the book by Lewis Carroll

“Why, also, on awakening from your dream and entering fully into reality, do you feel almost every time, and occasionally with an extraordinary force of impression, that along with the dream you are leaving behind something you have failed to fathom? You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you—all of that you can neither comprehend nor recall.” Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Along the September towpath in the morning it’s a dusky green light. Everything is late-summer, too-much-rain green and the branches stretch their sagging arms together and join hands across the path and across the water. You don’t see much beyond the branches and the leaves and the slick dark puddled mud of the path in front of your step-by-step feet. But the light in the tops of tall trees across the canal rings bright-midsummer-glowing golden reflected in the water, a light that seems to travel at a different pace and in a different direction than everything else around you. September is like that. Time moving fast and slow in confusing opposing directions. Cicadas screaming in the backyard, fish crows preaching in the churchyard, a cricket singing in the glass up on our shelf.

In the morning I go to the otters, and sometimes as far as the eagles, past the sparrows in the September clematis, and the starlings in the bamboo, and the goldfinches in the cornflowers, (I have measured out my life in birdsong). Past the field that smells like horses eating apples; sometimes under a glowery sky, sometimes under the pale wispy blue that seems to lift you over the lemony weeds. Sometimes when the change from cool late-summer night to hot late-summer day creates a mist so thick it clouds your eyes until the heat burns it off, though it still lingers over the river like near-distant smoke. Along to the bridge high above the creek where my boys used to swim, and from the bridge you see another distant bridge that seems to hold all the light of memory collected beneath it and burning through to the sparse grass on top poking up between the disused railway ties. A crown of glowing weeds.

I’ve walked this path with my dog a million times, out to the eagles and beyond to the field where she could run like a wild thing. She used to grab her leash in excitement to go faster and farther, and jump up and scratch my arms — a spiderweb of pale tattoos that will be there forever. Recently she told me she doesn’t want to go on long runs anymore. When I meet people on the path they ask me why I’m out without her, and I ask myself the same question. It’s funny how when you spend enough time with someone you almost feel less like yourself when you’re not with them.

We were talking the other day about the sense of losing memories. Not being unable to remember, but losing the thing that you’re remembering. The run in the field, the scratches on the arm, the creek with my boys, the excitement before a concert started, a ride in the car to a friend’s house or a nighttime beach or a doctor’s office, the dark hum of an airplane to start a trip, making dinner with people in an unaccustomed house, waking up in strange city, waking up in your own city and your own bed, your childhood bed, your now bed, looking forward to the day or dreading it, making dinner in your own kitchen, night after night, working on something big, working on all the little things. All of those moments that are gone, never to be here again.

I realized that when I’m running not with my dog I somehow feel more human, which feels odder than it should. When I pass people now, I think how strange it is that I’m one, too. How strange it is that we’ve all decided to act a certain way. Not, say, manners or societal expectations or cultural norms, but just everything. Living in houses and sleeping in beds and eating on tables at certain times of the day and greeting each other in certain ways and defining happiness the way we do. We must have decided long ago, long long ago, what makes a person normal. Hundreds of years ago we all somehow agreed on the rules we need to follow to be considered normal people, and now I greet people a certain way when I see them on the towpath.

I suppose these are all traits we’ve developed to keep ourselves safe and warm and fed, and to be sure that we get along with one another. In an ideal world, acting “normally” would also involve making sure that our neighbors are safe and fed and warm. After a big change — a newborn child, a global pandemic — we like to talk about a new normal, our idea of a normal day and normal interactions with others changes completely, and it takes a period of adjustment before we recognize the new patterns as the normal ones. Those types of events do cause an understanding of the fragility and the value of human life. They remind us that we need help from others, to appreciate the help we get from others, and that it feels good to help others. Sadly, the big calamity of the election of a grotesquely corrupt, incompetent, and self-serving fascist — twice (how? how?) — seems to have elicited a different, weary, resigned, sighing new normal. They’ve turned the temperature up so slowly we don’t know we’re dying. And now we accept dishonesty, self-serving corruption, intolerance, racism, sexism, cruelty (of both the casual/personal and systemic varieties), hypocrisy, entitlement, and hatred as acceptable, as normal, even as unavoidable. Our idea of normal behavior is not very generous right now.

But how can anyone be normal when we all spend half our lives dreaming? We all spend half our lives wandering in our own strange landscape, peopled with the creatures who gnaw at the seams of “normal.” We are all mad, here. Everybody! The people I pass on the towpath, the dog I wish was still walking with me, the assholes who decide that being normal means being white, straight, Christian, married with 5 kids, and wearing an American flag pin. (A return to a 50s ideal of normal, which is, oddly, when the animated Alice and Wonderland came out. Trying to conform to this idea of normal could drive people mad. And did.) Even these reverse-minded people, they spend half their lives dreaming, too. There is no normal in dreams, not the light, not the logic, not our companions, not our place in the world. Not our role as people. And we all have dreams. Everyone, whether we remember them or not. This the place where our worries and fears and hopes crawl in the damp earth under the shifting plates of expectation. This is the home of creatures who whisper to us that we’re not normal, we’re not okay, we’re not functional adults.

It always strikes me as strange that the word “dream” has somehow come to mean the most perfect, ideal thing. Dream job, dream date. American dream. Any real job or real relationship, however good, is like an actual dream. Discombobulating, sometimes, inexplicable sometimes. Joyful and frightening in equal measure. It all comes from us, but some how it’s all not quite in our control.

And I think we’ve all witnessed, lately, the horrific nightmare that has unfolded in this country. The idea of the American dream has become meaningless at best, horrific at worst. Embarrassing, laughable.

But this dream world is also the place where we see beautiful, impossible things. Where we’re working on the big things and the little things. Where we have written something unexpected and beautiful, or where we’ve formed a glowing friendship with a strange wordless creature, or we have a pile of greenblue dream rushes waiting to be turned into a film. Where we can fly (and fall). Where we can see people we’ve never met at all, and people we haven’t met in a while, and people we will never meet again in waking life. Maybe this is where all those memory-lost places live. And it’s all still a part of us. We smile at the absurdity of our dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to our true life, something that exists and has always existed in our hearts.

All that we can neither comprehend nor recall.

We are all mad here, but how can we be otherwise, in a world where “normal” has become so depressing?

… Laughs maniacally, starts to disappear.