Work in Progress

Love Borg

Volume 2 of the Liberal Kansas series

Sample

The narrator is the ghost of Ludvig Holberg (Danish-Norwegian playwright, poet, and fiction-writer, 1684-1754); he has been brought into the present to perform oneirotherapy on a young Norwegian theater professor named Odd Wee whose dreams have been hijacked by trolls from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Holberg uses the “dream” of his one novel, Niels Klim Under the Ground (1741), to empower Odd’s dreamtraveler.

Late that evening I go pay Odd a visit. He seems to be fast asleep. No telling how long he’s been out. But my plan is not to wait on the outside for his eyelids to start twitching; that would be too late. I’ll go inside his mind and wait for the PGO waves to start. Ponto-geniculo-occipital waves. Bursts of electrical activity rising up out of the brain stem. That’s the beacon that says REM sleep is about to begin.

How do I, an eighteenth-century playwright, know this stuff?

I read about it in Wikipedia.

* * * * *

When I go in, I can feel the tension. It’s like Odd’s brain is already paralyzing his body for REM sleep. Almost certainly stage-4 deep sleep. No stage-3 parasomnias: no night terrors; no walking or talking in his sleep. At night the somnambulism that has been taking over during the day would be stage-3 sleep, when the slow sleepy delta waves alternate with smaller, faster waves. Normally as we sink into stage-4 deep sleep, the faster waves dissipate, leaving only the slow delta waves. What I’m feeling in Odd is a kind of forced superimposition of the accelerated waves on the slow-mo sleepy waves.

If this is what he has been experiencing in stage-4 deep sleep every night, he can’t be waking up refreshed.

What I need to find is his dreamtraveler. That traveler must be asleep right now, but sleeping stiffly, rigidly, in the kind of decerebrate rigidity that impels a coma. I feel my way along the shifting contours of his sleeping mind, looking for deep folds that might be hiding the dreamtraveler. Finally I hear a kind of subvocal whimpering; moving toward it, I find the dreamtraveler, almost squashed under a fold. I get my shoulder under the fold and am able to pry it up far enough to pull the rigid body out. I begin massaging its muscle groups, opening them up, freeing them from the rigidification. It’s nice to be able to touch something again, push against the world and feel the world resisting.

I lift the body up onto its feet, hold it upright against my own, as if we were dancing.

* * * * *

And now it occurs to me that dancing might be just the thing! I start to hum, and to move my feet more or less randomly. Gradually my humming assumes the melody of “Ja, vi elsker dette landet” (Yes, we love this country), written in the 1860s by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norway’s first Nobel Laureate of Literature—though it was his cousin Rikard Nordraak who wrote the melody that I’m humming. Gradually Bjørnson’s lyrics begin to form in my mouth, but distorted. I’m singing in Norwegian, but the lyrics are twisted by what I assume is an experimental English translation:

Yow, we relly ruv dem rotters
Avesey angle fort;
Warpéd, waspéd over waters

Indy sousand sport.

Love it, love & overthink it,
Papadum’s green girt;

Will de saga-night but drink it:
Dreams & dreams of eart!

Absolute nonsense, of course—but that’s what’s coming out of me. And that last line, “Dreams and dreams of eart,” seems to be particularly puissant. Every time I sing it the dreamtraveler body feels stronger, more limber, more eager to lead me in the dance. In fact the fifth time I sing it I am startled to feel his left hand gripping my right, his right hand guiding my left hip, until we fall, fall, fall into Niels Klim’s cave.

* * * * *

We fall for what seems like hours. Through the dark.

“Where are we?” Odd’s dreamtraveler says finally.

“Inside the planet,” I say.

“Which planet?”

“Why, earth of course. Weren’t we just dreaming and dreaming of earth?”

“I suppose. Or eart. But when was earth or eart ever this dark?”

“We’re on the inside,” I say. “We’re falling toward the planet Nazar, through the saga-night.”

“What’s the saga-night?”

“No idea,” I say. “But haven’t you been singing about it all your life?”

og den saganatt som senker
drømmer på vår jord

Ogden’s soggy gnat some sinker

drummer pover yurt

“I guess,” he says finally. “Somehow it sounds strange down here, though.”

We fall in silence for a while, tumbling gently.

* * * * *

Dim light begins to permeate the darkness.

“Am I seeing right?” he asks. “Are there lights somewhere, or am I just imagining it?”

“Mushroom bioluminescence,” I say. “Seventeen different mushroom species glow green or blue in the dark. What makes them glow is the same stuff that makes fireflies light up.”

“What’s that stuff called?”

“Luciferase.”

“There must be millions of them,” he says, turning to look in every direction. “Lightning bug mushrooms.”

“Yes,” I say. “But the mushrooms are just the fruiting bodies of the mycelium, and there’s only one of them down there.”

“Mycelium?”

“An underground fungal network. Up on the surface of the earth a mycelium can go on for miles, linking thousands of trees together. One famous species up there is commonly called the ‘humongous fungus,’ Latin term Armillaria ostoyae; in the Malheur National Forest in northeastern Oregon there’s a specimen of Armillaria that is almost nine thousand years old. It is thought to be the largest living organism on the external earth, covering nine square kilometers and weighing thirty thousand metric tons. Down here the mycelium is much much larger, and much much older.”

* * * * *

“I don’t understand how life is sustainable down here,” he says. “I thought all living things got their energy from the sun.”

“All plants do,” I reply. “All animals too, to some extent. But not mushrooms. Not fungi. They get their energy from decomposition.”

“They eat decomposed things?” he asks. “They eat the things they decompose?”

“They decompose themselves and others,” I say, “and that is their nutrition. But they also enliven themselves, energize themselves. They communicate with something like electrical signals—hyaline spikes of electrical potential. The mycelium down here is like a giant fungal computer. It tracks and trades resources, like water and nutrition, but also information. The dirt is crawling with soil invertebrates, which feed off the mycelium; when they die, the mycelium decomposes them and feeds off the result.”

* * * * *

As I’m making that speech, some kind of flying beast targets us. It has the head, wings, and talons of an eagle and the body, back legs, and tail of a lion. King of the birds and king of the forest.

“That griffin is going to crash into us,” the dreamtraveler says.

“I think it’s actually called a gryphon,” I say.

“Let’s ask it when it gets here,” he says.

And before we know it, it’s here, and as it head-butts me I cry out “Are you a griffin or a gryphon?”

It wheels around and butt-heads the dreamtraveler and screeches “Grips!”

We plummet precipitously to the surface of Planet Nazar. But after all that falling, we land surprisingly softly. The mushrooms catch us. It’s as if they make a net above the soil, two nets, one for each of us, let them give beneath our weight (I seem to have weight here), then lower us gently to the surface of the planet Nazar.

“The grips had long ears,” I say.

“It was an unbarking hound of Zeus,” the dreamtraveler says.

* * * * *

We lie there catching our breaths, letting our hearts slow down.

“What are soil invertebrates?” he asks.

“Worms, flatworms, roundworms, snails, slugs, arthropods,” I explain. “You know.”

“Arthropods?”

“Bugs, like spiders and aphids. Ten million different species, both terrestrial and aquatic.”

* * * * *

“It’s strange,” he says, as the mycelium wraps us in its embrace. “Mushrooms look like plants, but then again they don’t look like plants. They grow out of the dirt on stems like plants, but they’re made of some other material.”

“Chitin.”

“What?”

“Their cell walls are made of chitin, like insects and crustaceans, not cellulose like plants. Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen; mushrooms breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide.”

“Like us.”

“Like you, up on the surface. Not me.”

“Right.”

“But it’s true that mushrooms are much more like living human beings than they are like trees or blades of grass.”

* * * * *

“What is growing on us?” he wants to know.

“The mycelium has been running its slender thread-like hyphae over us,” I say.

“What’s a hypha?”

“A branched, entangled, anastomosing hyaline thread,” I say. “A long branching filament in the filamentous structure of a fungus.”

“How do you know these difficult words in English?”

“Wiktionary,” I say.

“What does anastomosing mean?”

“Interconnecting.”

“What about hyaline?”

“Glassy. Transparent. Also sometimes amorphous.”

“I didn’t see that one coming.”

“That’s the great thing about dreaming.”

“Have you been here before?”

“Just once,” I say. “In a dream. I brought Niels Klims here.”

“And wrote your one novel about that dream, yes,” he says. “But I don’t remember any mushrooms in that book.”

“I was worried about the censors.”

“Because of the mushrooms?”

“That and other things. That’s why I wrote it in Latin and published it in Germany.”

“But Germans like mushrooms.”

No arguing with that.

* * * * *

After hours of silence:

“So where,” he says, “if mushrooms breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, just like us, does the oxygen that I’m breathing now come from?”

“Are you really breathing oxygen down here?”

That stumps him.

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“Down here you’re a dream construct,” I say. “A dreamtraveler. Your body’s asleep up on the surface, breathing away. Your dreamtraveler has gone out of body. It doesn’t need to breathe.”

“But it feels like I’m breathing!”

“Old habits die hard,” I say. “I died almost three hundred years ago, and I still sometimes forget I’m not breathing.”

A Zombie Theory of Translation

or, What is a “Revenant” Translation?

(Click here for free download!)

Work in Progress

Love Borg

Volume 2 of the Liberal Kansas series

Sample

Translout

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Gaswind!