What Is All Of That?

This is a photo of part of James Joyce's bedroom. It's at the James Joyce Center in Dublin. It makes me wonder about Joyce's dreams. How does this bedroom affect him while he is sleeping? No, I have no answers to the question. It's just a wondering. A curiosity. The question itself doesn't strike me as unusual.

And, of course, wondering brings it it back to me. In my bedroom there is a bookcase and on top of the bookcase is this stack of books:

How does having this affect my dreams? Specifically, what is this pile of books doing while I'm asleep? Nothing, you say? I find that extremely hard to accept. Yes, I could do an experiment. I could move the books out and see what happened. But I won't do that. I'm not that kind of scientific person. And doing that would interrupt something important that's already happening. No, I don't want confirmation. I'd prefer just to recognize that something good is happening.

And what's that? Well. The books are slowly and gently implanting in my imagination and my dream world what will eventually become my new stories. Right now, some of the stories are infinitesimally small, fragmentary, discrete, embryonic. These are just tiny seeds that will eventually grow into bigger stories. But others are already more developed, larger, structured, nuanced, self contained. Some have internal logic. Some have surprises. Right now, all of the stories, big and small, may seem to be unrelated to each other. But eventually many of them will grow larger and more complex and more detailed, and they will reach out to each other and be linked to each other in surprising ways I can't currently anticipate. In other words, these stories will grow magically and densely, much as a small village grows into a large city surrounded by a galaxy of suburbs, all being connected by wires and pipes and roads and highways and various, more subtle, more ethereal connections. By media, thoughts and beliefs. And, of course, by their stories.

I am happy to be the incubator for these invisible seeds. I have chosen the books, I have read many of them, and I am anticipating their alchemy. If they weren't there, piled up on the bookcase, if they stopped sending out their spores, my nights would become dreamless. And I might be in danger of running out of stories. With them there, constantly changing them for other books, constantly replacing ones that I want to move, I'm assured of having all the stories I could ever want. And some time in the future, when they are ripe, I will sit at my laptop and download them.

Maybe Plaza Italia

There is a wrought iron gate across the entrance. And it has a thick chain fastening its two sides together. A shiny brass lock as big as an open hand hangs heavily from the chain. Is all of this to keep me out? Or to keep me in? I have no idea. There’s nobody around to ask. So I search for a hole in the fence. Or a tunnel. Or an easy way to climb over the top. Or a tree or bush that can help me scale the wall. Or a hidden or dropped key. I’m patient. I know I will find my way in. Or is it out? I stand there searching for it. I’m content. I am trying to get to the other side.

When I wake up, interrupting the dream, I know that the gate and the fence will reappear, and the search will resume as soon as I fall asleep again. So I ask myself in a clueless, sleepy voice, “Well, what’s on the other side anyway? What are you looking for?” Of course, there’s no answer. How could there be? But the question delights me. What am I looking for? I have no idea. What’s on the other side? I don’t know. It’s a puzzle. As I fall asleep again I yawn happily, “Well, I hope I find out.” This always brings a smile. I like the idea of smiling in my sleep at my persistent search for something unknown.

I should add, though I’m not sure that it really matters, that I am wearing a brown raincoat and a hat with a narrow brim and that I am standing in a late Fall, afternoon rain. My glasses are foggy. And the hat is dripping. Maybe I am in Palermo. Maybe the street is Las Heras. I don't know. I have the impression that people are nearby, sitting in cafes drinking coffee and watching the rainfall on the streets. And others are nearby riding buses and subways home. I am sure that my adventure, if that is what this is, is not in their thoughts. This is exactly how it should be.

Midnight In Paris

A lovely movie. It inspired lovely reviews, like AO Scott’s in the New York Times.

One part deserves a special comment here. The protagonist (Gil) is writing a novel about “a guy who runs a nostalgia shop.” Your Bloguero has written that he “lives in a museum.” Your Bloguero knows this terrain well.

The question is where these dreams of Paris with Scott and Zelda, or your Bloguero's dreams of Buenos Aires with Borges and Macedonio take the dreamer. Your Bloguero doesn't go back. He can’t. No magic car picks him up. No. It’s that those people have somehow arrived here. And they’ve only temporarily left. Maybe they were just sitting at the next table having a Malbec. Maybe they just left the bar and were walking down Serrano. They're around here somehow. Somewhere. All your Bloguero knows is that having them in the immediate proximity, not necessarily in one's company, makes the city and the world richer. They're around until they are forgotten. Or ignored.

Your Bloguero does not go to Paris to visit Cortazar. No. Too late for that. He recognizes that he’s not physically there at the moment. But he's there nonetheless. The City and your Bloguero are richer for remembering him.

Marcel Proust put it this way:

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad."

The Elephant

When we last saw your Bloguero, he was in the sun, sitting on the deck, and contemplating Macedonio Fernandez’s Museo de Novela de Eterna. A question arose, as your Bloguero was fulfilling his role in that novel as its reader: is this museum your Bloguero lives in different in any substantive way from la Estancia de novela, where Museo takes place?

(Parenthetical Note to reader. Novela in Spanish has one “l”, in Ingles, it has two. Your Bloguero’s computer thinks it is supposed to insert a second “l”. Repeatedly. Despite constant correction. So language hegemony goes.)

Your Bloguero supposes not really. Dreams abound, and they have lodged themselves in some corners of this house. For protection. And longevity. And time has slightly discolored some of the walls, adding shadows, providing camouflage for the dreams’ many hiding places. Sometimes your Bloguero is amazed to find a dream sitting in the middle of the floor, or on the ceiling, there for the viewing.

One recent dream discovered thus:

An elephant has escaped from its handlers, and has run down the beach to escape the intense heat and to frolic in the ocean. It floats in the surf, blowing sea water through its trunk onto its back. On the shore, its handlers grow impatient for it to return. They yell at it, “Come bank, Sweetness, come back!” Sweetness, if that is her name, ignores them. She wallows in the cool water, she swims around in circles, she sprays the sea with her trunk. “Sweetness,” they shout. “Come back.” Evidently, she’ s not yet ready to return to land, to heat, to servitude, and to them. She ignores their shouts and continues her bath. The handlers become more impatient. And angry. One of them shouts at her and in frustration throws a coconut toward her. Sweetness apparently doesn’t care for this. At all. She trumpets and swims farther down the beach, farther away. The handlers run down the beach after her, kicking up sand.

But wait, your Bloguero mutters. Wait! An elephant? What is an elephant doing in your Bloguero’s dreams? Jaguars, tigers, bar flies, gangsters, judges, cops, sure. Spouses, ex-spouses, children, strangers, teachers, sure. But an elephant? How can there be a pachyderm, and a non-circus, domesticated, imprisoned one at that, in this dream? And what is this lumbering, heavyweight dream doing stuck to the slightly discolored wall of this estancia, your Bloguero’s casa, his finca

(A Second Parenthetical Note to reader. Admittedly this sliding from one language into another is not just another affectation your Bloguero has adopted. No. It has a point. Yes, it does. And the point is this: the border between the North part of this Hemisphere and the rest of it is an artificial, mental construct, that in your Bloguero’s opinion has facilitated exploitation and suffering. It needs to be made completely porous and then utterly ignored.)

This swimming elephant is obviously a dream elephant. There is no way that an actual elephant could be standing on the second floor of a wooden, 160 year old house in New England. Or swimming there. But that doesn’t make this apparition less valuable to your Bloguero. To the contrary: dream elephants are evidently rare. And paucity of supply, as the reader undoubtedly knows, increases price.

(A Third Parenthetical Note to reader. Your Bloguero is obviously afflicted with unusual, uncontrolled digressions. Bizarre associations. But never mind that. That is a McGuffin. Any paragraph that can connect the law of supply and demand with dreams of large mammals is worthy of your intense consideration. Is this intended as an illustration of the inter-connectedness of all things? Probably it’s more ambiguous than that.)

Your Bloguero doesn’t know how many dream elephants there are in the Northeastern United States this evening. They are not included in the census. But one thing is sure: there is at least one. And it is dutifully fulfilling its function. What, you may inquire, is its function? Your Bloguero never thought you’d ask. The dream elephant’s function is to be seen. It is to remind the viewer, the reader, of the primacy of imagination, of one’s innate desire to transcend ordinary, waking reality, and to step outside of it.

Today Is The Bard's Birthday

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

The Dream Machine

I'm sure I am dreaming. There are telltale signs. I’m sitting at a sidewalk café. I’m not sure who the gray bearded, rumpled, bespeckled guy sitting with me is. That is a sign. The table is right on the street. People are placing small packages of Kleenex on its edge as they do in Buenos Aires and then collecting them, but this café seems to be in Brooklyn. Maybe Williamsburg. That is a sign. The waiter, who is smoking and ogling two young women across the street, is ignoring us even though our glasses have been empty for a while. My companion strums his fingers on the table top, makes a noise of impatience, excuses himself, walks up to the waiter, places his arm around his shoulder and walks him back to our table. The waiter is smiling, passive. That is a sign.

We order more red wine. I want an empanada. They don’t have that. Do I want to see the menu? I don’t. What do you have that is like an empanada? I ask. Insouciance, says my companion. Be nice, says the waiter. I can’t eat that, I say. How, I wonder, can there be no empanadas? I’ll bring your wine and the menu, the waiter says, as he escapes. I have the thought that he will never come back. My companion shakes his head wearily.

“As I was saying,” my companion continues, ”people just don’t share and participate in the big dreams now the way the used to. Yeah, they can quote from The Big Lebowski or Seinfeld or other artifacts of pop culture, but they don’t know the books. They don’t know the ideas, the concepts. The canon. The history. The foundation. And if they don’t know the foundation, how can they possibly share the dreams? Their dreams are untethered, confused, ill formed because they’re not properly educated to participate in these big dreams.” He stares across the street at passers by. “Their dreams are about things, not inspiration. Know what I mean?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. I look at him. He really is a wild man. He needs a shave. His hair is mussed. His clothing is out of date. No, I don’t want a cigarette. He fires one up. “I don’t know,” I say softly. “Oh,” he raises an eyebrow. “Sure you do,” he whispers Silence.

I begin. “You mean we don’t share dreams and ideals because we’re not educated about them? We don't know the history?” I ask him. He nods. “Maybe we think about consumer goods instead of ideology because we’re trained to do that. Maybe people just care about themselves and their things because we’re in a deep trance, we’re totally drugged, we’re sound asleep.” He nods and pulls his beard a little. "Maybe we've lost our souls," I say.

“Listen,” he says. “There’s something I want to show you. It’s in the basement. It will remind you of what it was like before the trance.”

We walk through the café. The waiter passes us carrying our two glasses of wine. He has no menu. We walk to the back, and my companion opens the door to the basement stairway that says, “No Entrance,” in two languages.

He flips on a light, we descend a wooden stariway. In the middle of the room, under a clear plastic sheet, is a black and silver machine. He pulls the plastic off of it. He points at it.

“What is it?”

“It’s a mimeograph machine. It’s like a printing press. Or a copy machine. It’s what we used to make copies of papers about fifty years ago. And this is a very special one. It ran all day and all night long putting out broadsides calling for the overthrow of the military government. And for solidarity with the workers. And in opposition to the police. It poured out inspiration, and news, and organization, and ideas, and of course, dreams.”

“We don’t have this any more. We don’t have people to carry the papers and pass them out and put them under doors and paste them on the walls and put them under windshield wipers. We don’t have people passing out poems and arguments in cafes. We don’t have physical communities and discussions with strangers. Now we have blogging. Instead. This is gone. Isn’t that sad?”

I put my nose up against the machine to see whether any of that distinctive alcohol smell from decades ago, the intoxicating smell that used to be on school test papers, remained. It was all gone.

The Market Of Dreams

Where has it gone? I wander the dark streets, I avoid the dangerous blocks, but it seems to have moved. I can’t find it. I take a cab. The driver nods and seems to know where it is. When I get out, I’m in a block I haven’t seen before, there’s nobody around, and still it’s nowhere to be found. I wander around looking for it. It’s not here. I decide to go back to the beginning and start over again from there. Maybe I made a mistake, a wrong turn, and that’s why I can’t find it now. Then I can’t find the beginning. The streets seem to have been changed around. They don’t go to the same places. So I walk in what I think might be the correct general direction back toward the beginning. After a while, nothing seems at all familiar. I’m not really lost, I think. I just can’t find it. I wonder how I could get lost in a city I’ve known for decades, one I know so well, one has such familiar streets. It doesn’t make sense. The sky starts to turn pink and orange, the sun will soon come up. I notice the birdsongs. Now it’s too late anyway. The market will be closed before I can find it. I resolve to try again soon.

Eduardo Galeano writes,

“She wanders through the market of dreams. The market women have spread out dreams on big cloths on the ground.

Juana’s grandfather arrives at the market, very sad because he has not dreamed for a long time. Juana takes him by the hand and helps him select dreams, dreams of marzipan or of cotton, wings to fly with in sleep, and they take off together so loaded down with dreams that no night will be long enough for them.”

Memory of Fire (Genesis)(1658).

Why am I looking for this market? Dreams are like everything else. When they become tattered they have to be repaired. And if they’re worn out completely, they have to replaced. Because eventually they stop working. What once was a red, steel arched bridge high over a wide, muddy river, with a border checkpoint at the very peak and hundreds of people pulling pushcarts waiting for admission, waiting to have the guards read their papers, has crumbled. It’s rusted out. Nobody goes there any more, and most people don’t even remember it. And the river is gone also. The waiting for admission, the conversations, the smells, the sun, all gone. Even the Asian languages they spoke are gone. I’ve tried, but I can’t go there any more.

It’s not like I want to find a new bridge at the Market. That’s not how it works. You give the market woman what remains of the dream you wore out, and you gently haggle about it and what she has for you on her blanket, and then you pick out something completely different. Something you think will work. The very best thing they have are the wings. I like mine. But mostly, I like to wander the streets of this sleeping city on foot.


3/27/11

Your Bloguero On Top Of The World

See that rattle in my hand? What a sweet and powerful sound. May it bring into being whatever you dream. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be free from hatred. May all beings be well. May all beings be safe. May all beings have peace. May all beings realize their enlightenment.

Zobeide, An Invisible City

Italo Calvino tells us in Invisible Cities:

From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.

This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them, asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.

New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of escape.

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

And so, because we are chasing something or someone that cannot be caught, we think it's a good idea to build a trap. So she won't escape. And we build ugliness. How much better it would be to see whether we could re-enter the dream at another time and try again to resume the pursuit. Or do we mistakenly believe that we cannot step into the same dream twice. And that we should make our dreams and metaphors out of concrete, so that they can be easily recovered.

The Disk

Jorge Luis Borges (photo by Diane Arbus)

Some of Jorge Luis Borges's stories seem to be mined from that deep dream filled gap between being awake and being asleep. It's a magical space: vivid events occur that are at once as real as they are impossible. If the sleeper wakes, sometimes the impossibilities are revealed. And then there's wondering: how could anything that defies physical reality appear to be so real.

In "The Disk," a story from The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)(1975), the impossible object is the "disk of Odin":

"It is the disk of Odin," the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. "It has but one side. There is not another thing on earh that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king."

Ordinarily, objects are in three dimensions. Here one appears that has only a single side. Of course, it would be more or less invisible. And physically impossible on earth.

This, of course, is not entirely correct. The Moebius strip, discovered in 1858, has only one side and one boundary component. But that's not important to the story.

The person with the disk eventually "opened his hand, and [the narrator] saw the gleam of the disk in the air." But when he returned to where the disk was released, he couldn't find it. And he's been looking for it for years. In other words, the disk of Odin vanishes like a dream.

It's so reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra, "Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise."