Standard Dream Time

  Sata from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

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At seven in the morning Madame Sata appeared to me, vanished. I had just been walking in a wooded grove where the trees were at once above and below me, due to my lack of a body. In this muted dawn I spoke quietly with Cynthia who was like me, without form.

Hushed, we spoke out of reverence for the new day, though we both were excited and playful in spirit. Sliding below the shaded canopy of trees, we saw just ahead of us two figures, women who were talking together, also hushed in tone. Cynthia moved inside of me and I carried her while approaching the women, Trisha and Susie, who wore the ornate and hand made peasant clothing of the Caucasus. They invited me to the morning’s festival.

Back in bed, the warmth of the mattress and blankets described my mass and volume. “Across the sea, I am here,” I thought, and flipped open my mobile phone to see if the time had changed. There was an hour’s difference between my mobile and the clock on the cabinet. In the four paces between the bedroom and kitchen, I could feel Cynthia inside me, and see my sister and her girlfriend, Susie ahead of me walking on the soft, dry earth of the orchard floor. I could hear Madame Sata shuffling in my bedroom.

Once Francisco and I walked, talking about Virilio’s text on the changing of Time. In the few paces between bedroom and kitchen I was learning fast how to negotiate Time’s waters in this absent hour.

While I made coffee for all of us the crows jumped and cawed in the bare branches of the tree and there was frost on the rooftops. “Whoever invented Standard time was a fucker,” Francisco said. I could feel Cynthia laugh inside me, and was glad she liked Francisco. As we watched the hopping crows, a family wearing their freshly mended best clothing got on a dust covered bus in Iraq. They were Yezidi, worshippers of the Peacock Angel, Shaytan. This angel was proud in god’s love. Indeed, this peacock angel was god’s favorite, whose pride and fall had been greatly misunderstood by Christians and Muslims both, yet the Yezidi had somehow managed to survive nearly two millennia of persecution.

When the bus began moving through the dawn’s desert, the mother distributed freshly baked snacks to the sleepy and hungry brother and sister. Madame Sata, a black queen from Brazil whose story is better told through film, explained to us that we were gathered here this morning to welcome the young Yezidi family. Brushing the crumbs aside and washing my coffee cup, I noticed Francisco, Cynthia, Trish and Susie had gone ahead of me.

The bus was stopped at gunpoint by a group of Sunni Muslims, who boarded the bus, and noticed the Yezidis right away because of their best holiday clothes. They were lead off the bus and summarily shot.

In describing what happened this morning it occurs to me these ruptures in time function so we can carry Paradise within us. My friends live and breathe in different times and our hearts are the doors to Paradise. When the young family was executed this morning four doors to this garden were sealed forever in the name of god. Leaving the kitchen, Madame Sata was still gone.