Perchance to dream: NOCTURNES plumbs the soul's deepest abyss
BY ERNST GERHARDT

NOCTURNES is a disturbing, enigmatic work that teeters dizzyingly between apostasy and exaltation, allegory and monstrous truth, fiction and ambiguous abstraction. It also acts as a two-way mirror through which author and reader find themselves unabashedly engaged in mutual voyeurism. Dissecting a world where the obvious and the cryptic are willfully commingled, NOCTURNES leads an assault on conventional reason with ferocious and unrepentant irony. Denouncing preconceived notions about life and death, compassion and magnanimity, justice and inequity, sanity and madness, W. E. Gutman casts a cunning, often savage eye at society's most cherished self-delusions.

Implicit in NOCTURNES is a haunting ethical premise: Imagine a society where dreams are censored, where "unauthorized" musings nightmares, chimeras -- whether seized in one's sleep or evoked in a wakeful state -- are denounced, and recalcitrant dreamers are punished. For Mr. Gutman, a latter-day surrealist with a fondness for truths exhumed at the very edges of irreality, "dream and reality are rival symptoms of the same disease. Reality is incurable," he warns.

"The mind cannot actually ponder reality," Gutman asserts. "All it can survey is its own ideas about reality. Therefore, whether or not something is true is not a matter of how closely it corresponds to reality, but how consistent it is with our own narrow view. A complete understanding of reality lies beyond the capabilities of rational thought. Dreaming is the alchemy that frees us from the yoke" The "dreams" Mr. Gutman weaves in NOCTURNES, a disquieting collection of loosely interconnected essays, seem willfully honed to stupefy, disconcert, shock, even scandalize.

Bent on distracting society from its utilitarian yoke and reconciling irrationality with the rigors of conscious thought, Mr. Gutman argues that knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the opinions we inherit -- or that we perfunctorily manufacture along the way. In his view, knowledge is structured by the systems of codes and conventions that compel us to classify and organize the chaotic flow of human experience. A discernible penchant for deconstructionist philosophy leads Mr. Gutman to affirm that the only valid foundation for knowledge is an attitude that, on one hand, rejects "truth" based on blind trust or coerced doctrine ["any truth that owes its existence solely to faith is a lie"], and, on the other, proposes that reality comes directly from our experience of what it is to perceive it. He repudiates the belief that the world is simple and can be known with certainty. In so doing, he dares the reader to confront the limits of what it is possible for a mind unblemished by dogma to discover NOCTURNES' central message is that rationality is no match for intuitiveness in explaining the imponderable, which can only be hinted at by appealing to the imagination, not common sense. With sardonic wit and disarming irreverence, he admits to "a lifelong reflex and a lack of forbearance for the meanness, the inanity, the despotism, the odious banality of officialdom and bureaucracy." He then proceeds to strip "emperors" naked for all to see, to slay sacred cows, to fling their nauseating remains to the four winds. With the dismal fragments of their own intolerance now strewn at their feet, the author hopes, victims of self-delusion can at last find redemption.

A veteran journalist who reports on human rights violations and exposes political corruption and military excesses in Central America, the author does not profess to have an exclusive hold on reality -- or dreams. Instead he urges us to remove veils of ignorance that stand between us and what we already are, to seek within ourselves new dimensions, hidden planes of awareness.

Anyone requiring booster shots of cynicism, the kind that deliver dreamers from groundless hope, idealists from pointless fancies, will savor Gutman's new opus. All others, the straitlaced and the faint-of-heart included, are enjoined to abstain lest they succumb to its melancholy spell.
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Ernst Gerhardt is a New York-based freelance writer and critic.