Swimming Underwater

I am underwater, swimming against the current.  The sky lightens the surface above me.  It is pleasant.  Why are we so often underwater in our dreams?  I want to stay there and look at the undersides of water hyacinths, watch the minnows dart under their shadows.  I want to live like this awhile.

Waking dreams.  I made pictures with a woman last night because I was seduced by her writings.  She liked my photographs she said, "As an intellectual, feminist, and lover of things that are both beautiful and destroyed, I really appreciate your work."  I asked her ethnicity.  Indian, she said.  Hindu or Muslim, I asked. Muslim by birth, she reported, but she was no believer.  She majored in philosophy, she said, and was an existentialist.  I of course was intrigued.  Still, she was ruled by her father.  She would need to be careful.  "My family and the Indian community at large are pretty despotically conservative and maintain a vigilance on their community members that is reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia," she exclaimed.

My dreams were of the east, hers were of the west.  She was shrouded, I thought.  I wanted to strip away the veils.  Of course, I know how that story goes, thousands of veils, layer after layer.  An old fashioned Orientalist, corrupt and corrupting.

We exchanged more emails.  I did not want to shoot with her.  I did not wish to meet.  I only wanted her to tell me stories.

"The social dynamics of all this [family] are extraordinarily complex," she wrote, "and compromise is often the only reasonable half-solution. . . I have to play along with some of the games in order to be faithful to my love for my family."

Faithful to her love for her family.  I could smell the curry and spices.  She was Africa, England.

No, I did not want to meet.  I could only disappoint her.  Why did I think that?  I had become fanciful, I guess, swimming underwater, looking at the undersides of water hyacinths.