32 E. Madison

More about 32 E. Madison

I found the newspaper clipping after a friend read Still Life with Woodpecker aloud to me. It had been tossed into the paper box beside the wood stove, destined for the small anonymous glory of becoming fire. Instead, it lit something else.

The headline announced that Karlton Armstrong, one of the men convicted in the 1970 University of Wisconsin bombing, had walked out of prison on parole. Here was a man carrying history in a duffel bag while the newspaper carried history in cheap ink. The story wandered through names, prison terms, fugitives, FBI lists, courtrooms, Vietnam, Indochina, and the death of physicist Robert Fassnacht. It was a collision of idealism, tragedy, politics, and consequence compressed into a few brittle columns.

Back then I treated the clipping as though the universe had slipped me a backstage pass. Shortly afterward I had a dream after placing a string of amber beads around my neck. Bliss arrived without knocking. Standing beside an altar, I asked a woman where we were.

“Thirty-two E. Madusen,” she answered.

I asked again.

“Thirty-two E. Madusen.”

For weeks the phrase bounced around my skull like a pinball looking for enlightenment. I asked friends if they knew where it was. Eventually someone came back with an answer: Madison, Wisconsin. Suddenly my dream and the forgotten newspaper clipping shook hands across reality, and my imagination threw them a wedding reception.

Around the same period I encountered the South Indian Siddha tradition, the poet-alchemist saints whose songs treated consciousness the way gardeners treat roses—with equal parts patience, fragrance, and compost. Their chanting seemed less like music than gravity remembering its original purpose. I dreamed that alchemy, dissolution, and Śiva were merely three costumes worn by the same actor.

The dreams multiplied.

A red-haired woman cared for the Moon Child in a quiet apartment before I found myself transformed into a moustached man setting a table. Then came a Tarot deck. I cut the cards and drew The Hierophant, as though the unconscious had decided symbolism was more economical than conversation.

The final image remains my favorite because dreams possess a sense of humor unavailable to philosophy. I stood inside a vast gymnasium marked only by a giant letter U, while woolly mammoths wandered peacefully across the polished floor, entirely unconcerned that they had supposedly been extinct for thousands of years.

Looking back, I no longer see these dreams as coded prophecies. They feel more like wonderfully unruly dream artefacts—places where history, coincidence, memory, and imagination briefly agreed to share the same strange address:

32 E. Madison.