Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath

Author:Sylvia Plath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

On the blackest days, when I’ve scarcely time to squeeze one dream out of the old books and my copywork is nothing but weepy college sophomores who can’t get a lead in Camino Real, I feel Johnny Panic turn his back, stony as Everest, higher than Orion, and the motto of the great Bible of Dreams, “Perfect fear casteth out all else,” is ash and lemon water on my lips. I’m a wormy hermit in a country of prize pigs so corn-happy they can’t see the slaughterhouse at the end of the track. I’m Jeremiah vision-bitten in the Land of Cockaigne.

What’s worse: day by day I see these psyche-doctors studying to win Johnny Panic’s converts from him by hook, crook, and talk, talk, talk. Those deep-eyed, bush-bearded dream collectors who preceded me in history, and their contemporary inheritors with their white jackets and knotty-pine-paneled offices and leather couches, practiced and still practice their dream-gathering for worldly ends: health and money, money and health. To be a true member of Johnny Panic’s congregation one must forget the dreamer and remember the dream: the dreamer is merely a flimsy vehicle for the great Dream Maker himself. This they will not do. Johnny Panic is gold in the bowels, and they try to root him out by spiritual stomach pumps.

Take what happened to Harry Bilbo. Mr. Bilbo came into our office with the hand of Johnny Panic heavy as a lead coffin on his shoulder. He had an interesting notion about the filth in this world. I figured him for a prominent part in Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams, Third Book of Fear, Chapter Nine on Dirt, Disease and General Decay. A friend of Harry’s blew a trumpet in the Boy Scout band when they were kids. Harry Bilbo’d also blown on this friend’s trumpet. Years later the friend got cancer and died. Then, one day not so long ago, a cancer doctor came into Harry’s house, sat down in a chair, passed the top of the morning with Harry’s mother and, on leaving, shook her hand and opened the door for himself. Suddenly Harry Bilbo wouldn’t blow trumpets or sit down on chairs or shake hands if all the cardinals of Rome took to blessing him twenty-four hours around the clock for fear of catching cancer. His mother had to go turning the TV knobs and water faucets on and off and opening doors for him. Pretty soon Harry stopped going to work because of the spit and dog turds in the street. First that stuff gets on your shoes and then when you take your shoes off it gets on your hands and then at dinner it’s a quick trip into your mouth and not a hundred Hail Marys can keep you from the chain reaction.

The last straw was, Harry quit weight lifting at the public gym when he saw this cripple exercising with the dumbbells. You can never tell what germs cripples carry behind their ears and under their fingernails.

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