Dream d522-s: What the Lock Remembers

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Philosopher walked me out of the study entirely, down a flight of stone stairs that had not been there before, and we came out onto a towpath beside a canal lock in late afternoon light. Lano was already there, sitting on the path with his white tail wrapped around his paws, watching the water.

The lock was old. The gates were heavy timber banded with iron, and they were closed, holding back one level from another. A line of flat-bottomed boats waited on the upper side, their bargemen standing or crouching on deck, unhurried. On a small platform near the lower gate, a man sat at a tilting desk, writing in a ledger. He dipped his pen without looking up. He wrote without looking up. He had been doing this for so long that the motion was inside his body.

The Philosopher stood beside me and said nothing.

I watched the first bargeman step onto the platform and speak to the keeper. The keeper asked questions. He wrote the answers down: the weight of the cargo, the origin, the destination, the type of goods, the number of days at water. Then he calculated something in the margin, named a figure, and the bargeman paid it without argument. The keeper wrote again. The gate began to open.

The rain was somewhere above us but not here yet. I could smell it coming. The water between the gates was the color of old pewter.

What I noticed was this: the ledger was not a list of tolls. It was a record of the argument the community had already had and settled. Every entry was a premise accepted: that the lock had to be maintained, that someone had to maintain it, that the people who used it most should carry more of that weight, that weight was calculated by what you carried. The bargeman did not argue because the argument was old and he had inherited its conclusions.

Lano walked to the edge of the water and looked in.

Then the Philosopher said, quietly, "The keepers and the builders fought for a generation before they agreed on what to measure."

We stood there while three more boats passed through. I watched the keeper's hand move across the page.

On the walk back up the stairs, I stopped halfway and opened one of my notebooks. I looked at a sequence I had made months ago. Images I had put in order because they seemed to belong together, because something passed between them that I could not name but could feel. I had thought I was making a record. I looked at the sequence again.

I had been measuring.

Lano came up the stairs beside me and pressed his nose to my hand.

I closed the notebook. The rain found us then, light on stone, and we went inside.