A Procession of Colorful Turtles (Part Three of Four)*

Who Dreamed the Dream?

 

That said, there are some details about this dream that I failed to mention - Not because they are unimportant to the story, but because they were not a good fit at the time. The first is that when the boys were drawing in the pig and still thinking it was a crocodile, there was a momentary surge in the river’s current. The second is that, while Jean was removing the hook from the pig's mouth, he noticed that Jean-Paul’s hands were bleeding, even though he was oblivious to the blood that trickled from his own fingers. Perhaps these details are superfluous, but it is always best to tell everything when one of your aims is to determine a dreamer’s identity.

Now, as everyone knows, there are many ways to interpret a dream,[1] but in this case, there happen to be only two that matter. The first belongs to a French nobleman named, Camille Du Monde, the narrator and primary character in “The Sin of Seeing.” His is the orthodox and more palatable view because it is rooted in common logic. Then there is a somewhat more nuanced and even mystical interpretation that I have come to favor. Naturally, Paris regards the two as equally valid, as he contributed heavily to the formulation of both and is ever open-minded to the opinion of others, particularly when the others are his beloved inventions.

 

Du Monde points out that prior to his dream, Paris was ruminating about the things he hoped to accomplish artistically in the story you are reading. His focus was on the character he would later call, Jean Ami. However, it was not long before he digressed into reading about the history of the Middle Ages, specifically, something called the Albigensian Crusade, which amounted to a series of punitive military actions taken by the Church against the Christian heretics who lived around Albi in southern France. What happened is that large numbers of Catholics, many of them women, had gravitated toward a radically different understanding of Christianity, which would later be called Catharism. Its believers thought that there were two relatively equal gods, a good one, entirely made of spirit, and one profoundly evil that fashioned and controlled the physical universe.[2]

However, such dualistic beliefs were abhorrent to the Holy See,[3] and perhaps even more repugnant, the Cathars did not see much need to recognize papal authority, declining to tithe, and turning to their own theological perfects for spiritual guidance. Well, you simply cannot run a gigantic religious institution like the medieval Church when parts of the flock go their own way, disrespecting your office, and refusing to contribute to your goals. Consequently, vigorous measures were taken to address the problem, as the true measure of divinely-inspired leadership was thought to be the ability to control the behavior and expressed beliefs of others.

 

Now, since the Cathars had become well-liked by the Catholic faithful in the Languedoc,[4] the Holy Father tried spirited debate with them for a time, even sending the venerable Domingo de Guzman to argue on Catholicism's behalf. But when these mild efforts proved fruitless, he decided to excommunicate the rebels’ primary protector, dispatching a legate to get things back in order. However, the legate was murdered a few years later, and the crusade against the heretics of southern France began. Over the next two decades, thousands of Cathars perished at the hand of an inspired nobility, which was promised new lands for its service, with the office of the Inquisition ultimately bringing the Albigensian movement to a tortured and fiery end in the years that followed.

 

Monsieur Du Monde believes that it was Paris’s reading of this material that inspired his mysterious dream, for like the brothers, the Cathars did seem to be “fishing for crocodiles” in their slighting of the pope and their refusal to tithe. Some would even say that like them, they happened upon something beautiful in their contempt for the physical world, only to lose it because of their preoccupation with it. But this assessment of the dream goes no further than that, and it does not address at all several important questions. For example, why does Jean-Paul get mired in the mud? And why does he believe that he shares in his brother’s “sin” merely because he beholds it?