Carte d'Identite

Carte d’Identite  

 

 

 

 

     It's two A.M. on a damp November morning in 1979. I'm in the third story front of our old apartment house in North Philadelphia. Henry Miller is looking out the high window that over looks 13th Street. Joining him, I notice that we both have a glass of red wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. People are gathered in small groups in different parts of the room. Miller begins telling me about his latest encounter with his friend Alfred Perles. I listen with rapt attention, and at the same time, wonder how I can tell him how much his writing has meant to me.

     "You know, " I'm telling Miller, it's later now, we've finished our wine and cigarettes; "I first started reading your work when I was just a kid, seventeen or eighteen... No, that's right it was just after I had turned twenty-one at the Triv. The very first thing I read was, "Reunion in Barcelona." I kept reading it over and over. I even began to model my life on Fred. That was in 1959..."

      Miller nods his head remembering the letter. I feel a strong urge for a cigarette and wonder if Miller doesn't want one also. But, I don't want to leave my spot next to America's greatest living writer. I look into his eyes and think what life, what wisdom. It strikes me that this is not the Miller of today, 1979 T.V. talk show, People Magazine. It's a younger and healthier Miller.        

     I’m at the window alone. The sun is rising. Miller returns with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He removes it, leans close to my ear and whispers, "The French have a saying. Loosely translated it goes... Never try to fake your Carte d’Identite." His eyes crinkle with a smile that shows that the message is meant just for me.

     Monday morning at work, the dream was still with me as I sat down with my morning coffee and heard Ida telling Pearson that the one reason why she loves teaching sixth grade is because a kid never forgets his sixth grade teacher.

     "I can't remember a single thing about sixth grade," I told Ida.

     "Maybe that's why you're still there," she answered.

     "You run into them coyotes over the weekend?" Pearson asked as he zipped up his jacket.

      "No, I was up there twice, but no sign of 'em. Been over a month since I seen 'em.

      The bell rang for classes to begin. "You wouldn't believe the dream I had last night..." I told Ida as we walked to greet our students.

     It's a week later. I'm walking into my apartment house in Pre-Second-World-War Germany.  As I reach the second floor, I see a neighbor at a back apartment whispering to a couple Nazi soldiers. I over hear him say that Mr. Daley has no Carte d’Identite. The men in kaki uniform rush to my door. "It's in my room. In my blue sport's jacket," I tell them.

     I enter my apartment with a soldier pressed at each side. As I search my pockets, I find a raffle ticket. I show it hoping the men might accept it. They shake their heads no. I tap the inside breast pocket and find something else. "Please be it. Please be it..." I'm praying. It's another raffle ticket.

      The soldiers are escorting me down a stairway that leads to a hospital corridor. Several young nurses in tight fitting yellow uniforms rush toward me. They tell me that troopers are taking patients right out of their beds. One of the nurses throws her arms around me and begins to sob. "They took Mrs. Shultz right off a blood transfusion. They 're taking everyone who doesn't have a Carte d’ Identite. You have to do something!"

     The guards take hold of my arms. "I'll do my best," I call as we hurry toward the detention center. "They'll probably keep me only a day or two until they can issue a new card," I tell myself wondering at my calmness.

    Next evening, after I had jogged to the badlands, I tied the dreams in with Ida's comments on sixth grade. "Sixth grade. That's the year I finally shut off all real feeling, repressed my childhood innocence, and surrendered to ego and false personality... That's the year that mom and dad split up," I told myself and remembered.

     It's an early winter evening in 1949. My father comes home winners from the weekly poker game. All showered and shaved, he's dressed in his John Wanamaker's blue pin strip suit, white shirt, and tie. Sitting next to the radio, I'm listening to Blonde and Dagwood while I baby-sit my younger brother, Paul. Dad gives me my share of candy and asks if I want to join the others at the Baptist Temple. I figure he probably wants to go himself. Besides, I'm really into Blonde and Dagwood. I forget that mom isn't at church with my brother and sisters, but up the street a couple blocks visiting her sick friend, Johnny.  Dad finds them together. He moves out to a mid-city hotel. Johnny takes a room on the third story of our apartment house. He begins to have meals with us. The menu changes... And, the guilt is deeply buried.

     "In creating a world to fit your needs, you lose touch with that which is," I tell myself as I sit at my typewriter, ten years after first recording the dream. Our self-image, or self-indulging as Castaneda called it back then, creates our world. The Kunderbuffer, the Forbidden Fruit that keeps us at our low level of consciousness, is nothing more than this self-centeredness. It is what separates us from the cosmos... We give up our identity for an identity card...

     It's like Gurdjieff says, you create your personality, your ego, in your relationship with the world around you. But, it starts a lot sooner than sixth grade. And, the self that we create is all in the imagination. Isn't it? Our imagination, which keeps us locked in the picture of ourselves; a picture that we create in trying to live up to their expectations, holds us in one place. We are locked in the prison of our personality.

     Krishnamurti says it even more clearly. If there is no thought, then there is no ego, no center, no time-space. We construct all the barriers; create the separation with thought. Beyond thought, there is no separation, no observer, no I.  Everything comes together like in a dream where past and future are joined in the now...