On Dragons

If you’re a dragon– which you’re probably not, but the question remains, if you’re a dragon– what do you want?

You’re probably not a dragon because if you were you wouldn’t be reading this. Dragons aren’t known as great readers. You don’t see them browsing bookstores, perusing the aisles at Barnes & Noble. They’re not found pushing up their reading glasses at a table sipping Cappuccino while they leaf through Dan Brown's latest opus, or the collected works of Winston Churchill (who would, let’s be fair, be much more likely reading for them.)

They’re just not built for it. Those claws, like sharpened freeway cones, can’t flip a page without shredding it. Those talons, the size of tree trunks, don’t grip a book well, or twist readily to hold it up under a dragon’s snout. And just think about those snouts, since we’ve gotten there– they’d set books on fire just by breathing out. And what spectacles would fit on them?

Add to that the fact that dragon eyes are placed opposite each other, on either side of their heads, looking out at different horizons, and you see how impossible reading is. No, dragons might be good storytellers– they do have some reputation for good memories, and after all, they have to have some way to keep their histories– but reading, books, the whole publishing industry are not up their alley.

So we’ve resolved you’re not a dragon. But if you were, if you were not reading but out thinking dragonish thoughts and doing dragonish things, what would those be? And even more important, what would you want them to be? What would you want? What ambitions or dreams would fill your spiky head, what thoughts and desires would circle around in your lizardy brain?

Freud, you’ll notice, never asked this. No doubt he thought of dragons as mere mental figments, the boogeyman leftovers from our hidden childhoods which he’d made it his business to plumb, excavate, and expunge. No time now to discourse on Freud, or precisely what and who is hanging on to figments and delusions here. This is a story about dragons, or if not much of a story, since it lacks little things like plot and characters, an essay. And dragons are its subject, not any venal Viennese Victorians.

And of course dragons are real. We see them everywhere. If we didn’t, how would we know what to fear? They separate Dark and Light for us, they give shape to our terrors. People who don’t see dragons are wildly neurotic, as you would be, too, without any sort of signposts about what was friend and what foe. Those people never know what’s Dark and what’s Light, and so they confuse everything. They live in fear, anxious over every footfall, whereas the rest of us can usually tell our friends’ feet– solid, steady, measured and footlike, for heaven’s sake– from the dragging, asthmatic scrape of talons coming to get us.

If the dragons ever go away, we’re all in deep shit.

But what do they want, these signposts on the road between nightmare and dream? What they do for us is fine and good, but their own inner life is the question of the moment.

And how can we know what anything so truly different from us wants?

A slightly easier question is, what do they do? And in that case, we have some information. They fly, they toast virgins, they collect treasure.

Well and good. Now, can we discern any motives for these actions?

Working backwards, it’s fair to note that the treasuremongering is unproven. Reports vary, and while some dragons in some quarters do seem to display a notable appetite for bright, shiny things, this hardly makes them different from certain businessmen, or toddlers for that matter, and nobody ever raises a horde to go flay those. Although maybe they should sometimes. Anyway, there are just as many dragons, throughout legend and literature, who show no interest in treasure as there are those who do, so we can probably dispense with the question of purported dragonish treasure fetishism altogether.

Flame-broiling virgins is another puzzle, but think about it: if a kingdom volunteered to truss up its favorite daughter for you and left her waiting out in the open, wouldn’t you accept the gift, too? You might choose to do something with her other than char her like a toothsome marshmallow and swallow her whole, but then we’ve already established that you’re not a dragon. Perhaps that’s all they can think of, the only use obvious to them for a hot blond tied to a stake. Really, the alternative is almost ickier. Think about it– would you actually want the scaly beast to hold off, take her home with him, and start canoodling under the bedclothes? If you do, if that sounds charming, I’m not sure I want to know you.

So that leaves flying. Well, dragons fly. This seems unquestionable. Things fly because they have wings– and vice versa, in this Darwinian world. And therefore flying, in dragon lore, goes remarkably unquestioned. They have wings, ergo they fly. Humans have feet, so they walk.
Ah yes, but where do humans walk? How do they do it? Which among them shuffle, which strut? Which trip over their own shoes, and which prance like Lippizaner Stallions? Where do they go? And how do they decide on those destinations?

It’s how we use our gifts that matters– if you consider feet a gift, which perhaps a slug would, although maybe not a centipede.

Why do dragons fly? And where? Considering, for the sake of argument, those moments when they’re not circling menacingly over trussed-up virgins or hunting down the heroes who ride ineffectually to save them.

One suspects that, like humans, dragons fly in all manner of ways, in uncountable directions. For an infinite variety of reasons. That they all have their own “why”s, and their own “where”s.
But there must be some lesson to glean here. Some useful conclusion, some excuse for this exercise in mythic psycho-babble.

Their names are their deaths, you know. Their names tell their deaths, they label them. Rather like all those Biblical characters whose demented parents gave them names like Red-and-hairy, or God’s-promise, or Whaddya-know-a-baby. Imagine being yoked with a name like that through the third grade? Imagine the teasing?

But if you’re a dragon, you know what your name means. And then again, you probably have no idea what it means. Do you suppose Stealth, fabled mother of the desert-dwelling Sage, the onetime ladyfriend of our guy Faraway, had any idea that just over the next Mojave mountain ridge from where she was happily raising her daughter, a bunch of men in uniforms and crewcuts were building her namesake death-machine, a scary if elegant piece of technology that would not only inspire terror in the hearts of small nations around the globe, but become her– quite literal– downfall from the high skies over Nevada? Can you imagine her imagining that, even knowing nothing about her?

I can’t. Of course she didn’t know what her name meant. She knew only that in some poetic or ironic or vilely amusing way, it would prove appropriate to her end. And so it came to pass. And her daughter, lost among the sands, and her daughter’s moonlight partner Faraway were left to ponder the incident, and wonder, in their turn, how the secrets of their names would be revealed.

And that is, perhaps, what motivates a dragon. A dark thing, who exists in our world to give us focus, to provide an anchor for terror. To keep us sane. They want to know how they’ll die.
Would you want to know that? Would any of us? Would we dedicate our lives to it, if we, like they, had little else to occupy us, few other calls on our time?

If we knew that we could learn that secret, and yet didn’t pursue it, wouldn’t it haunt us, weigh us down, hover over our shoulders and mock us for ignoring it?

The catch is, of course, that unless a dragon investigates ahead of time, he only has a so-so chance of ever understanding what his name means. The moment of death, if it’s quick, robs him of the solution to this mystery. Did Stealth know? Did she understand? How could she? It’s not like Stealth bombers have big signs painted on their matte black shells, reading, “Hi! I’m a Stealth Bomber. I’m about to run into you and kill you. Have a nice day!” She would have had no chance to read it, anyway (assuming that she even could read English– see the notes on dragons and reading above). Those planes fly too fast to make out cheery death notes.

So a dragon’s faced with a conundrum: spend its life obsessed with its death, death sucking life from its whole existence; or, ignore death and live for today– eat a hero and be merry, as it were– and chance never knowing the greatest, central mystery of its existence.

So Faraway the dragon followed Seth, because he believed this odd hero who had walked away was the most singular thing he’d met in his life, the first human in his knowledge to break the mold, to turn off the path of tired expectations. And he hoped that, by following Seth as he bashed through metaphorical underbrush, beating aside leaves and branches usually undisturbed to one side of the common road of existence, he might stumble over some clue, some light of epiphany, some indication as to just what “faraway” might mean.

And why not? That’s how stories work, isn’t it?

Sometimes?

Finally, this is a story about how things come together, and how new paths are struck, and what happens when you combine two different goals, not to mention species.

Imagine a crossroads. A place of coming and going. With, above, the night sky, handily painted Tiffany blue to show off the sparkling figures there. A canopy of constellations. A dome of stars. A gigantic chuppa featuring the Zodiac and all its attendants.

Seth had come to Grand Central Station because it was famous, and famously worth seeing. It was The Train Station The Didn’t Get Knocked Down, as opposed to its less fortunate cousin to the West, which had been turned into a depressing strip mall.

Grand Central is still New York’s point of entry and exit for thousands of people every hour, towered over by the classic architecture, and the backwards, upside down heavens, and the massive volume of air that is, all by itself, perhaps the rarest New York attribute the place possessed. So Seth had come to see it, and found the dragon waiting for him. Again. Looking like nothing so much as a dragon this time– no ancient queens or statuary in evidence. And Seth walked right up, in the middle of the great floor, with travelers bustling on all sides, and stared at it. He meant to ask why it was following him. But of course he knew that answer. So he didn’t say anything after all, but just stood there for a few long moments, while the chatter of commuters and tourists wove all around them, and the thousands of people went to and fro.

Seth was well aware how odd that was. Whatever he might be prepared to face, as a hero, he knew that most of the population was much more discriminating. But now, here, people moved past them in all directions, coming, going, trading spaces with each other, working through their intuitive dance as they shared a location that was neither here nor there, never arrival but only endless departure. They rushed by, they eddied and clashed like a dozen creeks all intersecting in a rapid. The air was filled with roaring and rumbling; underlying everything was one of those indeterminate noises that come from too many sounds made all together. Low, low sounds, that cannot build up into anything besides indistinctness. Distant thunders. Heavy trucks on highways a mile away. Cars through tunnels, heard from outside.

But no one stopped to stare at them. Or rather, no one stopped to stare at the dragon, in spite of the fact that they had to eddy around him like some new, enormous boulder plopped into their accustomed stream. He caused bottlenecks on all sides, and a line of people waited to move past, between his bulk and the wall. But they didn’t stare, they didn’t point or run. One or two of them glared at Seth, because he stood in their way, stationary in the tumult, and they had to step around him. But the dragon seemed invisible.

“Why doesn’t anybody see you?” Seth demanded.

“You see me,” the dragon answered. Which was not unreasonable, not untrue, but also not germane. Beside the point. Was this an error in translation, or a gentle nudge from the beast that it thought Seth had asked the wrong question?

“I know that,” our hero said, exasperated. “But why don’t they?”

He got a better answer. “I am not what they worry about. They have bigger fears than me,” the dragon tutored.

“There’s not much that’s bigger than you.”

That didn’t get a response. Sarcasm, this hero was learning, didn’t, often.

The dragon went on sitting on the floor, in the middle of the jostling crowds, who kept passing by him, pushing each other and struggling, but leaving a berth around the beast as if he were electrified.

“I don’t get it,” Seth grumbled.

A band of boy scouts passed. None of them looked at his companion, any more than the adults did. One might expect children to notice, he thought. Children were reputed, in every story and TV movie he knew, to be innocent and therefore open to sights and thoughts untenable to adults. Children were supposed to See Things, children were supposed to Know.

The dragon breathed in Seth’s ear, “They don’t see the difference.” Seth jumped.

“What?”

The dragon raised its head again. “Children’s worlds are full of monsters. I am not what they’re afraid of, either.”

“You seem to know a lot about what human beings are afraid of.”

Dragons are not made to shrug. They’re not built for it. But this one blinked.

“We know your fears,” it said.

“What do you want? Are you going to follow me forever?” And just consider that: something so huge and truly, unalterably alien, taking such an interest in you. Personally. Inexorably. Usually, relations between men and snakes are limited, particularly when the snakes involved are the size of train cars. Meet, kill, move on. That’s all there is to it. Usually.

The dragon didn’t answer. Perhaps it was mulling it over. Perhaps it had gotten distracted, was thinking about who, of those around it, looked like an appetizing snack. Perhaps it hadn’t understood the question. Who knows? But it stayed silent.

“If you’re going to keep following me–” Seth tried again, but he stopped, because he didn’t have a finish for that sentence. What should he say? ... I’ll beat you up? Or: ... let’s go together?
“What do you want?” he asked at last.

And the monster did answer that. As he had before.

“To know the meaning of my name.”

This time, Seth nodded. The name, the meaning... it had been repeated enough times that he got it. He wasn’t sure where he figured in this mystery, but there it was. If the beast had decided he figured, then he figured, whether logical or not. Who knew how logic happened in that scaly head?

“What do we do, then? If I go with you?” he asked.

The dragon’s head tilted. It was looking thoughtful, Seth thought.

“To quest.”

“Uh huh.”

Seth folded his arms, frowned, pressed his lips together, and thought hard.

Flying off on a dragon’s back, even (perhaps especially) a dragon that had only recently been trying to kill him, seemed fairly heroic. He didn’t mind that. On the other hand, he had no idea what this creature was questing for, where it would take him, or whether or not their journeys would serve any purpose for him. What about his quest, his purpose, his heroic goals and needs?
When he forced himself to be honest, of course, he realized he didn’t have any. That is, he had no goals and no quest, at the moment. Needs could be summed up in basic human terms: eating, sleeping, peeing, and not being dropped from great heights off a dragon’s back.

Assuming, then, that the monster wasn’t just trying to kill him in some ridiculously convoluted, James Bond villainesque way, riding off with it might not be bad. Flying with it might lead him to a quest, or he might even find that he could share its; that the beast’s goal would do as a heroic pursuit.

In either case, why not go? What the hell, Seth thought.

And how many great endeavors and heroic quests have begun with that thought? How often have heroes (and, for that matter, political leaders, and great scientists and thinkers, and Hollywood celebrities) made their decisions just because they had nothing better going and were bored? What the hell? The whole history of the world might be encapsulated in that question.
“Okay,” he said. The tourists and commuters piled up to the left and right, fighting to make their way through the narrow channels left between the dragon and Grand Central’s walls. He considered.

“Climb,” the dragon told him. It leaned down on one foreleg, lowering its shoulder so he could reach it by stepping on its knee.

“Holy shit,” Seth said, and felt a shove from behind. The crowd was getting thicker as the rush hour started. One impatient commuter had made a statement.

Seth caught himself on the dragon’s knee as he stumbled, and then stopped and looked up at it. Scaly, green-gray, hot to the touch– exactly what he’d expected to feel. He hitched his backpack more securely, planted his hands on the rough surface in front of him, and clambered up.

“Hold on,” he heard, as he reached the neck. He found a protrusion to sit against, another to cling to.

“Oh dear God,” he whispered, and felt Faraway spring up from the floor. He wasted one brief moment wondering how soon they’d crash into the ceiling, whether he’d fall, if he’d die when he landed on the floor or only shatter his spine and spend the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. He lay along the dragon’s neck, already feeling the wind from its wings. Where were they going? How were they fitting inside Grand Central Station, flying, with air rushing all around them and no screams or terror from below?

The crowd filled in the space Faraway had left on the floor just like a stream filling in the hole when a boulder’s taken out of its bed. Water prides itself on filling everything, without prejudice, without rancor. It never notices the change, it merely takes advantage. That was how the commuters moved.

And against the pale blue night sky that stretched across the domed ceiling, merging with the figures and the spray of stars, one black figure flapped, and rose, and grew more distant, shrinking till it disappeared like a breath of cigarette smoke, rising and dwindling against the colors.

And the dragon, with our faithful hero, was gone.

NEXT POST: A ROSE AND A VIRGIN (Friday 11/6)