I just reread Lilith by George Macdonald. The timid and conventional Mr. Vane (not terribly vain; but a weathervane!) moves into his ancestral home, which turns out to be rather larger inside than outside (like many of us). A talking raven leads him out of Victorian England into reality--a shifting multiverse of riddles and mirrors and moonlight and tribes of lost children. And Lilith, the primeval rebel.

Vane slowly learns: worlds within worlds--and no way out but further in.

It's eerily dreamlike for a nineteenth-century novel arising from Christian traditions; its ideas anticipate Jung by decades. There's an Alice in Wonderland quality too, though not because he imitated his friend Lewis Carroll. The other way round, if anything; Macdonald read the manuscript of Alice and encouraged timid Carroll to publish it.

I can see why Carroll respected him. Ahead of his time.

Very far ahead. Where did he acquire that whiff of Kafka? Not to mention Philip K. Dick.

THAT NIGHT

I'm sitting in the ruins in a slow rain, with the feral children who call themselves simply the Little Ones. We're squatting by a chimney, trying to start a fire. Something keeps telling me we can't, or it's wrong to, but I keep trying. A tiny box of matches, battered and rhomboid now. Almost no tinder either--the Little Ones found some tiny twigs and straws and some airy, cigarette-sized objects--are they dowels of balsa wood? I keep trying--a twig will often catch and smolder down its length, even transfer its flame to another, like the Buddhist notion of reincarnation (as I align them and blow tensely)... but they gutter out, never setting the pile aflame. Still, a bed of hot coals is growing... well, warm soot and ash. Will we reach critical mass, or run out of matches?

Dizzy from puffing, I let the Little Ones work on the fire a while, and toss bits of bread to the birds, perched on the crumbled wall-tops, and hopping in the weeds. It's good to feed them. "Everyone has a bird-self" said Mr. Raven, in "Lilith."

A huge squirrel appears and drives the songbirds away. Fully the size of a cat--to the songbirds it must look like Godzilla.

Then a bird sails in and lands on the ruined chimney. A man-sized bird! Squirrelzilla squeaks in panic, and flees. It's an Owl with a fierce beak, ash-gray, with a faintly barred body... but up its flanks run luminous yellow racing stripes, as if the Owl is some sports car! Glares down, its huge, intense green cat-eyes staring into mine...

And I know it's my bird-self, my guardian. Just as the Raven came for Mr. Vane, this bird has come for me.

I fear the ferocity of my guide--and I have nothing to feed it but... bread.

A NOTE IN THE MORNING

Nothing to feed it but bread? Oh. I'm saving money, for the first time in my life, but... riches in heaven? Not much. No fire in my life! I am not meant to spend my life working in suburbia.

LATER THAT DAY

I'm gardening when my neighbor Marianne suddenly pops out of her cabin to grumble "I hung up food for a songbird that's been visiting, but a big squirrel came and stole it all."

THAT EVENING

A friend drags me out to an outdoor play in the city park. It's a musical called "Manifold Destiny." It's by the Caravan Traveling Theatre, a troupe that wanders the West Coast in horse-drawn wagons, in defiance of King Oil. The play's about a man who's half-car--a satire on the cult of speed.

But all that's background for me--I'm gaping at the set! It's by Spain, the underground cartoonist. He's into sculpture and set design now. For Manifold Destiny, he's built looming cyborg effigies of the animal totems of America--the spirits of our cars, watching over us:

• The MUSTANG, a freedom-symbol, but an empty one--not a horse but a gas-hog machine
• The JAGUAR, fierce, green-eyed, pelted with just my owl's shade of luminous yellow, lit from within
• The THUNDERBIRD, ash-gray with faint bars... exactly like the owl in my dream

YEARS LATER

This dream, and others that year, prodded me to make contacts in San Francisco's underground arts, theater and zine scenes. It took four more years to save up the bread, but at last I quit my day job and moved to San Francisco to be a dream artist. I never looked back.

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