N and I were evaluating an apartment that appeared to be a converted basement, storefront, or loft. The structure had concrete walls partitioned with antique wood paneling and mouldings from sundry old buildings. The trim was a distressed, blackish tone. Ostensibly we were going to live there. Thus it would seem to be a point in the past when we were still together, but it's difficult to draw logical or temporal conclusions as dreams are neither subject to deterministic physical laws such as causality or entropy.
We kneeled down to eat dinner at a low table, like a coffee table, Japanese style. We ate fish. N sat opposite me and H was at my right hand. A huge tiger came up and lay between H and I; he rested his enormous head on the table. I was so terrified that I couldn't think what to do; I didn't want to retreat and abandon them or make any sudden move to provoke the tiger. It was completely docile, however. N seemed to act as if he were our pet, and looked at me sternly as if to scold me for letting my food get cold (a bad habit of mine which has provoked more than one woman).
I cut pieces of my fish and carefully slid them across the table with my knife, in hopes that the tiger would attend to the fish and not attack us.
When I awoke I was very perplexed by this dream. What could the tiger have been? I first recalled Blake's The Tyger:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
The commonly accepted interpretation is that the "Tyger"--versus an actual tiger--is an allegory and reconciliation of the apparently contradictory beauty and ferocity of nature. As Dr Ed Friedlander states in this unusually insightful commentary, the tiger represents "the beauty and the horror of the natural world."
But this was my tiger, something dark that I feared deeply within me. Was it my rage, my fear of failure, my lusts, my envy--which of these plentiful failings could it be? For there is no shortage of rage, no lack of injustices done unto me.
Certainly one of the things that surprised me most about my Lenten abstinence of alcohol and negativity (and a commitment to realism) has been sudden occasional reveries involving vengeance. Not exactly violent, but thinking of how those who deprecated me at work, for example, would be thrown before a tribunal and their perfidy exposed, perhaps in this life or better yet in the next so their torments could be meted out by pitiless demons. Hopefully those found in the Chinese hell, where they are fond of crushing their hapless victims to a pulp beneath a grindstone, sawed roughly into pieces by day and sewed up clumsily at night. What I have not learned of mercy during Lent has been replaced by a certain clarity of thought. I wish them a good life that their desserts be all the more delicious in the next. It will soothe my time in purgatory knowing my television will have a channel perpetually broadcasting despair and hellish suffering. Much like the E! channel.
But back to my tiger. What I've learned during my long period of quiet solitude is that my demons haven't been purged; they are merely tamed, for the time being, like the tiger. I have in my time of distress fed fish to my tiger--the fish being mercy and charity, in the same way Jesus fed fish to his followers when they came to hear Him on the mount. It seemed such a meager, futile gesture in the dream. I expected the tiger to maul me in the next instant. And yet it worked. It utterly placated the beast in me.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
