Habanero Pepper has a Dream

                         Yet if I try to imagine this [state of being] I am restricted to the resources of my own mind,

                         and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions

                                 to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining

                                 some combination of additions, subtractions and modifications—Thomas Nagle, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

     

Habanero Pepper wasn’t the first Claymation FVW denizen to dream, but his dream was different. Habanero Pepper dreamed about two hairy legs. At first, it was only one leg, but then it was joined by another, and then still more later on. Habanero would not have known how to describe the strange tentacle-like appendage with a small flattened hand at the bottom that extended five stubby digits of its own; but, he had carefully observed Hand’s recent death and resurrection, and had noticed that Hand was attached to a tentacle called arm, and that arm was itself connected to a large pear-shaped mass, out of which extended another arm, with its own hand. Thus, there were two hands; and even more bizarre, were the lower appendages. Banana and Tomato knew to call them legs, and since Banana and Tomato were amongst the most curious of the Fruits and Vegetables, it was only natural that Habanero—who was also quite observant—adopt these strange designations as well. Moreover, having had a dream of one, and then a companion leg, each covered with a lichen sheet of long mangy carpeting—or hairs—it was inevitable that Habanero would invent and then append more compound appellations to his strange dream creature.

The next night Habanero dreamt the creature again; only this time, it consisted of numerous legs, moving about in disarray like an assemblage of forks and knives arranged by a Dadaist; all going in opposite directions, and exploring intrepid itineraries without any oversight or purpose. But Habanero knows, having seen the blueprint for such a creature in the Hand prototype, that the legs are attached by two’s—although he can’t really give any good reason why it shouldn’t be in some other combination like three legs or even more—and are joined by the odd pear-like structure, whose lower part narrows into a waist.

But still, something is missing. Two legs and a waist need some kind of executive management; otherwise, they just march inexorably forwards until they drop from exhaustion and all the hairs on the lichen-sheets fall out and run for cover in disarray; or, something like that, as Habanero doesn’t quite distinguish between compound parts that are inert by themselves and executive parts that stand back and direct in a supervisory capacity. The rest of the creature functions as a mere factotum, whose purpose is, to do the errands and muscle work for the administrative sections of the apparatus, or so Habanero assumes. In other words, only one part can think on its own—how silly. Therefore, the rest of the various appendages and lumpy pear shaped things, wait for that part to give the order; and that part is called “Head.” Head is the managerial portion of the hairy legs creature, and Habanero imagines it attached directly to the waist and legs, before realizing that it needs to have the Pear-shaped mass, and the arms and hands—like Hand does; only, this creature is far more hirsute, and this makes it much scarier to dream about so frequently. Not that it seemed particularly dangerous to Habanero, not after the endless predations of Hand, and its sinister companion double, who up until recently, no one in the Claymation FVW Fruit Bowl had ever actually seen, or even thought to conjure in their most vivid dreams.

Then Habanero Pepper has an epiphany: Realizing that the shock of this gestalt shift has now pushed him completely into the temporal present he declares, “I will call it ‘Bigfoot,’ because of those flattened hands compressed under the weight of those powerful legs; and, because of those stubby digits emerging from the bowels of those flattened hands—those ‘feet’—like terrified children slithering out of a sewer pipe bomb shelter.” Habanero is exquisitely pleased with himself, and his tiny lips change color like a sound-sensitive lava lamp reacting to the tempo shifts of a King Crimson record, inducing a frisky playfulness. “’Foot,’ what a funny word,” thinks Habanero Pepper, and he begins to giggle, “Tee-hee-hee-hee.” When he giggles, his little orange body shakes like a dancing fava bean and his mouth lips turn deep red and then all silvery, forming the shape of two sinewy undulating dolphins joined at the muzzle bumps. His dolphins also find the word ‘Foot’ to be quite hilarious, especially when the word, “Big’ is placed in front of it.

Words, of course, were new to denizens of the Claymation FVW; they had always existed, but had been noticed only peripherally, as sharp feelings bordered by color patterns, signifying a cuneiform screen crawl. Now, they had taken on a fresh sensory resonance; not just as vibrations, but as actual ruptures in the curious wave-pattern realm of sounds. This was quite an accomplishment for Claymation creatures, especially for Fruits and Vegetables, whom, it must be remembered, had no ears; a sign, in fact, that they were in the grip of some acute Renaissance of self-awareness; which, in itself, was far preferable to being in the acute grip of Hand, who now resurrected, still lurked in the world of Kitchen. And Habanero knew that Hand was probably the inspiration for these nightly sojourns through the portal of the muse and into a world of oddly imagined, tangible objects.

But Habanero has a strange feeling about these dreams; he does not believe—in the depth of his seed membranes—that they resonate transparently. Instead, he can sense that the strange calculations hovering about the images of these still disembodied feet, hands, and other physical manifestations of this strange creature, articulate its existence in a very peculiar and specific way; and this ‘way’ seems to foreclose on any variety in Habanero’s invocation of its being. It is like making an adjustment to an image after the image has already partially resolved itself; and in doing so, added garish colors and patterns that, while separate from the original, are expected to assimilate into the larger structure without dissonance. He flashed on the picture of a tree sapling with two large metal braces attached on either side to guide its growth into a particular pre-planned pattern.

For, unlike Habanero—who could sense temporally jagged, but intimate tactile manipulations performed on his Claymation bodice—the ‘Bigfoot’ apparatus, if that was even close to the most accurate word for it, was a largely self-propelled and autonomous entity. How then, could its being be gerrymandered in such a way as to incorporate it into a single frame of reference? Surely, an autonomous creature would move hither and yon, and in every other direction, when reacting to even the most subtle intimation of pressure from any particular point on its internal compass. It could never be one thing for long, as its complexity was already a source of convection that would generate all manner of strange impressions and subsidence’s like radar signals for it to follow. And ultimately, to itemize each part that comprised its wholeness, as if they were in close proximity to one another only by some strange functional coincidence, was to elide consideration of its essential completeness. That completeness was a thing that could be seen as color or picture but not known as a vibrating resonance.

Still, the sheer pleasure of having a method of describing such exotic stuff was a powerful seduction, and Habanero Pepper had discovered the fun to be had experimenting with nonsense names and phrases. There was Decalibratoryemancipation, Phytoplanktonianquietcessesitation, Zimbrosculatoryreticinotation and Carnivoretdeliberatethymeeresignatoryparrotation. Those were only a few; for he could make words that stretched out past the boundaries of the Claymation FVW and into the very heart of the macro-inhabitations of the very large—some as far as a substance called ‘Moon;’ or was it an object, he was never quite sure? Habanero pepper also liked to repeat assertive commands, in the inimitable FVW way—as Claymation Fruits and Vegetables could not literally make sounds with their Claymation mouths—such as, “Prepare the Virtual Nematode;” “launch the Infinite Phylacteries;” “smite the recalcitrant Glyptodonts;” and, his favorite, “aerate the cosmic nasal inhaler!” These statements had little meaning for Habanero Pepper; as words themselves, when combined in this way, seemed superfluous. Yet, there was a form of reality etched in the spaces behind it—partly obscured by its own schematics, but still quite viable in many ways—that he sensed and was fascinated by. It was, he knew in the depths of his seed-cradle, a manipulation of consciousness that colored it with its own artifactual qualities. But, it had its own poetry and time signatures as well; which, from a purely aesthetic point of view—a concept that Habanero Pepper expressed as a shimmering accumulation of incorrigibly promiscuous color—gave him a tingle of mouth-lip scalding pleasure.

Consciousness itself was addictive; after all, one didn’t really know anything else—it was the available wire mesh through which everything was pulped and filtered. Therefore, it only made sense to conceive of things through this narrow juicing mechanism, even if it atomized objects into infinitesimal points where two essentially empty spaces intersected into a virtual field of immanent meaning; the modular platform out of which one could construct the discretely arranged elements, forming the framework of an idea. In other words, Habanero Pepper thought—or, more literally, ‘flashed’ in myriad colors and impressions—the very act of thinking determined what it was that one actually thought about and how it ought to be construed; and, while this process was seemingly automatic, Habanero could sense that, in whatever form it took, it also pinched off a small part of the world from the larger mass through which it was extracted and then put that residue under a giant magnifying lens. And, even when it ascertained—through the various vocabularies that it utilized like a cheesecloth to wring the moisture out of wet lumps of milk curds, vegetable matter, or clay—the total meaning of the everything that surrounded the more particular things of which Habanero was a single example; it could not help but reduce the sum of those ‘things’ to artifacts of its own peculiar expression of the world. Habanero Pepper did not know how to get out of such an unlikely and labyrinthine trap.

He likened this paradox to another dream he remembered; this one about a strange spindly legged creature which had a large proboscis, teardrop shaped skeletonized leaves jutting out from both sides of its pear-like middle section, and was entirely covered with a bony carapace. The creature would stick its proboscis into a scaly sheet of dried soil, which was punctuated by individual strands of a thick chitin-like elephant grass jutting from small tuber shaped holes at regular intervals; and as it did this, the ground around the drilling proboscis would become red and rise slightly. Then the creature would pull out its narrow thorn-shaped trunk and promptly regurgitate a thick chowder of viscous liquid before sticking its nose right back in, and then sucking up material from under the dermal soil layers, along with the very stuff it just spit out. Habanero Pepper couldn’t gauge exactly what this creature was, but he could understand that it didn’t distinguish between its own effluent and the nourishment it obtained from the ground while using it. It was all one big messy suspension whose flavor was as much a reflection of the ingredients in the creature’s vomitus as it was a product of the nutrients in the ground under the elephant grass. When it was finished, it would extract its proboscis completely, which was always followed by a small trickling of red sap from the tiny hole that the creature had just drilled.

The dream always gave Habanero Pepper the same sensation afterwards, of a tiny hot wire running across a small section of his outer skin, and throbbing in a staccato fashion, as if he too were being drilled by the same spindly legged creature. It would send a shudder into the deepest regions of his seed-membranes, causing his Claymation lips to quiver like a radiating wave in a diagram superimposed over a map of a city in a hypothetical schematic of a nuclear blast. Habanero imagined this sensation personified as a tinier version of the same spindly legged creature, trying to communicate something important by generating whispered skin-quakes through his elastic outer fibers—which, of course, was not so strange to a Claymation vegetable who often conversed in color patterns and vibrations. He knew that it all had something to do with his dreamed vision of Bigfoot; more to the point, the fact that he might have dreamt Bigfoot wrong—especially now that the creature had taken on characteristics too complex to be easily described or even understood. It had gone from a strange cartoon to something too varied to be encapsulated, and it continued to ramify into unknowable branches of being.

Perhaps this was one of the principle qualities of a monster: an animate presence too large to be comprehended except as an obvious simplification into schematic representation, lest it overwhelm the beholder, and reproduce within his/her consciousness the characteristics of the keenly observed monster itself. Such a choice invariably formed into a dichotomy: one either distorted the nature of what was intuitively understood, or was, in essence, distorted by it. This did not seem like a fair appraisal of the infinitely divergent arbors that intertwined the aforesaid reality into dense lattices of impenetrable kudzu. Surely, nothing this complex could simply be reduced to an either-or phenomenological proposition: the beholder had to at least try to understand it, even at the risk of merging with the identity of such an infinitely conceived world. Then again, drowning himself in the particularities of the ‘Bigfoot’ realm was part of what made Habanero’s dream so appealing; that is, as long as the immersion was temporary.

For indeed, Bigfoot was Habanero’s vomitus, his injection well liquid, his extractive juice—his cheesecloth, in fact—through which he now comprehended an entire world of similar creatures, their movements and strange mannerisms; even the odd audio waves that they created by vibrating special glands and structures near their flesh-mouths. It was a strange world, and this was the source of his aforementioned difficulties; as he had no idea whether knowing it through an aperture called ‘Bigfoot’ was to really know it at all, or simply to conceive of it through the matrix of a fantasy being whose own identity reflected some obscure aspect of that world, now foregrounded as if it were the only thing dominating the skyline of its peculiar metaphysics.

Later, he would dream entire species of odd flesh-monsters, such as the white-gloved hordes; animated creatures—like those of the Claymation FVW, but more spidery and modular. They would march into a garish curtain of orange and purple smoke, before coming out through an evocation of its other side; a paper barrier that they would break through, like an idea forming from the raw stuff of thought at its moment of gestalt. These masses, these mices, these mackenzy mice; these Mickey-Mouse Mice hordes—what were they, and how did they become these words, shiny and smelling of antiseptic, dripping from the outer membranes of Habanero’s orange tinted pudding-skin sheathing, at the moment of his awakening? It seemed as if, at a certain, very specific, time, lost to memory like a recurring primeval galactic collision, all of these dreams had come together in a way reminiscent of an agglutination of molecules that comprise a larger substance. Habanero had no idea what this substance might be, but he could feel its weight slightly altering his center of gravity, like a halo of those previously imagined and barely discerned digits, forming and shaping his Claymation bodice into poses that would pass instantaneously into the next configuration in the cycle without being noticed.

Permeating the time-line between the dilating wave-function of expectation, and the collapsing singularity transpiring as a convergence, just after the gestalt of resolution is made manifest, Habanero shifts tenses until he is propelled into the present moment. However, he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, and be several rooms down, so to speak, in the context before pretext, in places that haven’t had a chance to solidify into a tangible reality because they have yet to be imagined. So, while sitting in the movie-theater-seat sized channel between the already happened and the yet to occur, he adjusts his chronometer ever so slightly in the interest of temporal balance. Now he’s just right, for he knows that he has to be ahead of the realization, so that he can augment it towards a kind of clarity.

This is a bit like riding a wave of tomato juice, while standing on a petrified running-board of mango skin. If Habanero can avoid becoming ponderously entangled in the cocktail glass debris at the other end, he can navigate his way into an understanding of Bigfoot and its peculiarly off-kilter world of aforementioned tangible objects. Still, Habanero has no idea what ‘riding-a-wave-of-tomato-juice would be like; and even less of any coherent notion of why someone as inviolable as Tomato would even consider turning himself into a juice. Nonetheless,  he knows that he must come to understand this process—even if it is only a way of expressing something metaphorically through the strangeness of words; which themselves, still feel novel to Habanero, looming about him like anthropomorphic trees in a Maurice Sendak jungle. For this unusual itinerary is as close as he can come to a feeling that approximates the radiating green and yellow sunburst that he intuits as equivalent to the word ‘progress.’

The best and most effective way to achieve this, of course, would be through a process of controlled dreaming. Habanero Pepper thus concentrates his energy, until it gathers like disparate clumps of individuals coalescing into a large crowd, and reaches a crescendo of density similar to that of tightly packed bodies around the figure of a single charismatic speaker. This speaker has a transparent, light-bulb shaped head, which begins to expand exponentially, transmogrifying into a cartographic chart of an unknown territory comprising spatialized vibrations of varying resonances. The whole episode is rather short lived, transitional and very ambiguous; Habanero is shot, as if from a large metal breach, into a rapidly disintegrating beryllium mass, before finding himself in a field of tall green shoots—the proverbial grass of his Bigfoot dream.

In a large convex space that to Habanero’s unseasoned glance looks like a blue hat over the spires of nearby greenery, he can detect movement in the distance. Soon, the remote rustling is replaced by a percussive vibration that is accompanied by small dark projections of vague shadowy forms coming across the horizon, and breaking the illusion that the sky is an homogenous blue mass. Instead, Habanero can see hundreds of hairy-leg pairs moving rapidly, in the same graceful way like falling snow bouncing along the ridges and protrusions of a white hillside. He doesn’t know where such images come from, or if they could be called, analogies; but, he can see that the alternating flexing of leg muscles is not at all tree like in its motions—as no wind-bent plant, no matter how poetically it bestrides the air, can match the sheer complexity and athleticism of these movements—even if they are of a similar color and solidity.  

There is a moment that always arrives soon after the first instant of recognition of type, where one sees a familiar particularity that allows for distinctions that set generic examples of an entity apart from one another, and bequeaths individual characteristics to the specific entity most prominent within one’s field of vision. This individual—one of numerous Bigfoot creatures—was the one that Habanero now decided was probably the most amenable to direct communication. A few days earlier, such a notion would have been unthinkable;  and, even now, Habanero barely knew what to say to this hulking presence, or how to reconcile the numerous barriers that existed between them, and which might result in some colossal, and thereby consequential, misunderstanding. But it was worth the risk—especially since the worst case scenario involved little more than a quick shuddering as Habanero re-awakened into the Claymation FVW realm—so he took the first awkward step in that direction, and did something no other denizen of the Fruitbowl had ever done before, in any state of consciousness: he spoke an actual word.

“You…” It didn’t come out sounding as he would have expected, but it resonated correctly, so he waited for a response.

“hhhmph” the Bigfoot grunted.

Habanero was delighted at this strange vocalization; it was like discovering a strange music broadcasting from the magnetosphere of a distant planet, emanating from a frequency picked up on one’s clock radio.

“Hmmmph” Bigfoot grunted again, in a slightly lower register, causing his tiny orange counterpart to break out in Claymation Fruit and Vegetable mirthfulness. The huge creature just stared back at him, as if trying to figure out exactly how to respond. Habanero, pulls himself forward into the present tense, and is now smiling so broadly that his mouth-lip dolphin-shapes are beginning to stretch and contort, looking almost as if they could separate and swim off in opposite directions. He lets out a shrill cackle of friendly laughter, “hee-hee-hee-hee,” and the creature smiles in response, but then bares his teeth. This ambiguous reaction is unexpected and Habanero must think of something to say that can be more clearly understood.

“Zeit, Lufthansa…?” croaks Habanero, as he suddenly realizes that words are strange ungainly things that take on a life of their own regardless of what one intends to say. More perplexing is the fact that these are words that Habanero has never actually heard, and he is inclined to wonder if he might have simply made them up; then again, it may not matter, as Bigfoot is puzzled and beginning to grow impatient. The creature’s mouth is open wide and baring even more teeth than before. Habanero can feel the vast difference in their respective physical architectures; the mouths being emblematic of their larger variances, physiological and otherwise.

“Oaghwortsgsdui!” interrupts Bigfoot. Habanero does not know what this means, but realizes that he is better off not attempting to repeat it, as the enunciation seems to engage areas of the tongue and throat in an intimate and complex exchange that he cannot simulate so easily.

Instead, he offers a spontaneous recollection of more words that he cannot remember having ever previously encountered.            

“O universe of forms I ask

Are you a mirror, or a mask?”

“Melnechuk!” bellows Bigfoot. Habanero is perplexed, and wonders if there is any way by which he can facilitate the act of translation between two such differently oriented beings.

“Melnechuk!” repeats Bigfoot, who is suddenly joined by a chorus of ‘melnechuks,’ emanating from every point on the horizon, and from every Bigfoot figure that Habanero can see with his Capsicum inflected optics. But he doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about; and, as the crescendo of ‘melnechuks’ grows louder, Habanero feels a strange anger welling up inside him. Immersed in this temporary sense of frustration, he begins to awaken; sliding back to Claymation consciousness as his vocal simulations become dopplerized and form an expletive that curls into a diphthong, which breaks finally, like a giant wave, onto the olive-pit strewn beach of his self-awareness with one final, Fouuuk!

At first, Habanero is disappointed. He has been unable to make the connection and create a gestalt; then again, none of the other fruits and vegetables knows anything about this, so it’s not as if he has failed to make discernible progress. Nonetheless, he knows in his seed beds that by learning to communicate with a strange creature such as ‘Bigfoot,’ he might develop a hypothesis regarding the ontology of the Claymation FVW realm. But, Habanero knows that his latest dream may be as close as he may ever get to discerning the motives and being of such a mysterious and bizarre creature. “Perhaps it was all a dream,” he says to himself in an old fashioned cuneiform screen crawl. “Perhaps, one should not stray so far from one’s own being simply to try to inhabit that of another, but such desire seems too natural to suppress.”

With that, Habanero Pepper goes out to the center of the Fruitbowl to mingle and preen with the other Claymation Fruits and Vegetables. Soon, the Bigfoot creature’s memory retreats to the bottom layers of his seed membranes, to reside as a colorful and exceptional memory, but a memory nonetheless. Still, Habanero, in the depths of his capsicum-comprised carapace knows that Bigfoot is more than just a memory; he is a phantom; and now, Habanero Pepper, like Banana, and Tomato, is haunted by a specter he can’t explain or forget. He is momentarily lulled out of his ruminations by a long shadow; it’s Hand, coming in for a repast. Habanero knows that he is too hot to be a likely choice; but, the threatening visage is a reminder of a familiar ritual; business and terror as usual in the Claymation Fruit and Vegetable realm. “Is it the same everywhere?” Habanero wonders. He receives no answer as Hand passes overhead, lunges for Macintosh Apple, and misses. “He’ll be back,” thinks Habanero, as he runs with the others for cover, just in case.

 

JZ Rothstein 3/27/2014