Four Dreams From November

Posted on March 1, 2012 by randomyriad

#1

Through the skeleton-keyhole, dark smoke oozed, forming a cloud monster with two red points of light near the top. I know the lights were just for show, not eyes. The power producing the monster perceives me in a different way. The smoke creature cannot harm me. I know that I must perform a series of empirical examinations and experiments to discover the power behind the illusion of smoke .

 

 

#2

In a vast cathedral with vaulted ceilings, I purify my system by consuming rocks and water. People of all ages are gathered in family groups, grandparents to babies. I pretend to have a brain injury in order to walk around naked.

I came to the cathedral in a stolen, silver sports car with the shine gone out of it. I show it to my new friend, a bearded man about 30 years old wearing a pith helmet. He wants to borrow it.

As I doze in on a long dark wood bench my head against the rough stone wall, a woman asks me about my brain injury. I tell her that the doctor said that my brain is like an electrical device shorting out. I demonstrate with a power cable showing her how it was randomly losing connection as the cable is moved because the wires inside were only partially connected.

Then I sat remembering a time when I helped the police with an investigation into the murder of a child. The prime suspect was a French film director. The crime scene was a sandy clearing with a grass hut. They could not identify the body so no solid connection could be made to the suspect. He was set free. This had some vague connection with my fake brain injury and the church.

 

#3

A pack of dappled wolves chase me through the gloom of evening, threatening but not attacking. They are human as well. I realize if they consumed me I would be lost, but if bitten I would become a wolf like them. Finally I find a yard with a massive cast iron gate. I run in a push the gate closed with a gong-like clang.

The iron fence surrounds a school where they are forcing children to search the for coins, making massive excavations in the chalky earth with shovels and moving massive amounts of dirt up the steep walls of the pits with wheelbarrows on narrow switchback paths. The warden of the school punishes the students when they do not work hard enough by firing popular teachers.

 

#4

I work as a comic activist, and the generators at our office, powered by Sy Safranski CFC’s, was not working. My boss sends me to the library to research CFC’s. Later I work for Head Start. I arrive late to work and do not get the list of clients I am supposed to visit. At 2:00 in the afternoon, a woman comes in and says, “It’s time to go.” I have to go to RanCo which is a big box hardware store where the old computers are stored. Using a 1980’s computer with green screen display, I have to print out massive lists on 17” by 22” sheets with sprocket holes on the sides,. All I can get it to print is nursing home medical files.

 

Posted in Dreamtime, Telling Stories, visions from the dark side, Wild Life, working world | Tagged | 2 Comments

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Posted on February 26, 2012 by randomyriad

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by Parmigianino

John Ashbery studied this picture and wrote his thoughts into a poetic meditation on art and life as an explorer of human experience in the the world. The poem is easily as fascinating as the picture. It is of more than a thousand words and equal to the picture as a work of art.

The poem is long and of a piece so much that pulling a section out seems like pulling a piece out of the painting, which also has that feel of a finely crafted whole without pieces. There is one section that stuck to me more than the rest as if the poet was speaking clearly, some of the muddled feelings and doubts I have about living and creating art.

A whispered phrase passed around the room
Ends up as something completely different.
It is the principle that makes works of art so unlike
What the artist intended. Often he finds
He has omitted the thing he started out to say
In the first place. Seduced by flowers,
Explicit pleasures, he blames himself (though
Secretly satisfied with the result), imagining
He had a say in the matter and exercised
An option of which he was hardly conscious,
Unaware that necessity circumvents such resolutions.
So as to create something new
For itself, that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being. Parmigianino
Must have realized this as he worked at his
Life-obstructing task. One is forced to read
The perfectly plausible accomplishment of a purpose
Into the smooth, perhaps even bland (but so
Enigmatic) finish. Is there anything
To be serious about beyond this otherness
That gets included in the most ordinary
Forms of daily activity, changing everything
Slightly and profoundly, and tearing the matter
Of creation, any creation, not just artistic creation
Out of our hands, to install it on some monstrous, near
Peak, too close to ignore, too far
For one to intervene? This otherness, this
“Not-being-us” is all there is to look at
In the mirror, though no one can say
How it came to be this way.

This section in the middle of the poem says as well as I could how I feel about the process of  creation whether it is just getting through a day or creating art, but in pulling it out I have also lessened its impact, because it is dovetailed nicely and built into the structure of the poem. It is more powerful in the poem than out. But, you can judge for yourself here.

 you can hear the whole poem read by the author the here : https://youtu.be/zrvXX9QVAT8

Posted in All part of the process, capturing light, Check this out, mindworks, my museum of inspiration, Other peoples words, paying attention, poetry, thinking in words | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

February Visions Seen Through My Windows Inside and Out

Posted on February 24, 2012 by randomyriad

Two Sides of a Card

 

Patterns of Light Harvested and Manipulated

 

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Late October: Dreams and Poems and Busyness

Posted on February 21, 2012 by randomyriad

At the end of October, I kept myself busy. I began attending a writers group, working on my second draft of my first NaNoWriMo novel while I was preparing for the next NaNoWriMo, outlining connections between characters and places on an imaginary map for my second novel. I was storytelling and doing music every week at the preschool, and searching unsuccessfully for more work. I was tackling some interesting subjects in psychology as well about the nature of consciousness and the effects of sleep deprivation (of which I have a lot of personal experience being a recovered chronic insomniac). I had no difficulty sleeping or staying awake during my studies.

10/16/2011

Dream:

It is my 29th birthday party. Hundreds of people are at my parent’s estate to celebrate. I know almost no one. My large floppy dog at times changes into my youngest son as a baby;one time his head rests in a pool of water dreamily. When I go to use the bathroom, I find the toilet completely shattered.

10/19

Dream:

I drive my daughter to school through a silent suburban neighborhood similar to one of those I grew up in.

I could hear a toilet flushing a mile away, I think.

There are two routes to take to get to the school. The one we take is through a more broken down section of the neighborhood on a street called Frontier Way.

“Your mother doesn’t like this way,” I say turning to look at my daughter, but she is gone. Puzzled I say her name.

10/20

Dream:

A girl, about seven years old, in a grey fur coat walks through a dark room.

“Mother had to leave,” she says with an English accent.

then I am driving a Winnebago with a dashboard crowded with plastic snack containers filled with compost and dirt which falls on my lap and floor. I am trying to put it all back as it was when the journey began.

I pull up to a house, and go up to the door with friends who were riding in the Winnebago with me. The people in the house speak Spanish. My sister organizes a work party. We move soil from the roof into terraces formed by cinder block walls on the slope next to the house. I walk beside a little girl, under the scaffolding that holds up the plank pathways from the roof to the terraces.

“Tambesoso,” says a voice from above.

“That means it doesn’t matter,” I say.

“Que chucha,” says the voice from above.

“That means how cute.”

 

10/24

 

Three Fall Poems

 

 

 I am sitting in the sun

Minding my own merry

How the shine does simmer in

Like a sudden cherry.

 

 

 

Close the Door

The morning light glares in upon my page.

While the wind, outside, rushes blindly in a rage,

Howling in the hollows beyond the tumbled tracks

Blasting in estuarial brawls, bending leafy backs

Licking at the lintels, picking at the locks

Moving the machinery inside the broken clocks.

 


 

The crows’ hoarse croak

Echoes in the alley,

Trampled by boot tread

And trailing wisp of smoke from a pack

Of hang-about teenagers.

 

Standing on a bridge,

Life all laid out and gasping,

Rasping growth and sundry parts colliding

with the pungent smoke

coming from their lungs.

 

 

10/25

 

Dream:

I am with a group of teachers grading  a color/music test using templates. It is going to be a long night. Then my oldest son arrives with a three pot coffee maker he just bought.

“It was only thirty dollars,” he says.

Journal Entry:

I fight for each word and time flies by outside my cocoon of thought. I look, every now and then, to see I am battling hours and words.

 

10/28

Dream:

In order to follow the law, I have to solve a complex logic puzzle of divisions and rules:  I have to move across a certain area, systematically crossing each section in a particular order, and I can’t remove the tag from my white blanket.

Posted in capturing light, conversations, Dreamtime, Family, Fiction, my life, NaNoWriMo, novel projects, Palabras, personal history, poetry, Questions and riddles, River of Dreams, Teaching and Learning, Telling Stories, thinking in words, Word play, working world | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Half of October: Thoughts, Dreams, and Visions of a Slightly Employed, Part Time Student.

Posted on February 19, 2012 by randomyriad

In October I was taking a general introductory course in psychology and medical terminology while looking for work and working very part time at a little at a preschool. I was thinking quite a bit about how I had maneuvered into this particular space in my life, about choices, obstacles and mirages that I steered around and through to get here.

10/1/2011

Journal Entry:

What is my life now and why is it so different?

I was thinking about all the moves we have made since we moved to Washington, the biggest move of all. We came a thousand miles to the island to live in a tent in a friend’s backyard with 3 children for a month, then out on the lake, driving to work on frozen roads past the eagle trees and swan fields. The world around our house froze into fantastic silver. Then we went back to the island on the side of mountain in the house with the big wall windows facing the mountain sunrise, Kulshan and the Sisters and the bird chorus mornings in the spring and summer, riding the waves to work each day and waiting for the boat to come and take me home. After that the short time in town, the letter streets, walking to the fellowship, feeling a part of a community, almost, as much as ever. Then down to Mount Lake Terrace and the horrible crawling commute across the floating bridges, so much water to cross in Washington.  And then to Kent when I worked in White Center and Burien on the West Side, Richard Hugo’s haunted ground, but now working at Head Start with the immigrant families from Africa, Somali enclave villages. In Kent life is spread over 30 miles from church to downtown to hiking trails and the zoo in Tacoma and Mary’s work in Bellevue. So back we come to Bellingham to focus our life in one place, but life will not be still and just as many things fall apart even in the closeness of a small city. I went back to my old job and every year it got more difficult to help families and teach children. Mary couldn’t do church work anymore and decided to become a nurse after a frantic search for a better path. All of this while we struggled to find ways for our children to learn what they need to live and negotiate our relationship through tidal surges and troughs as I felt my way through my usual dimly lit self-centered tangle of reflection and reflexive insomniac haze. It all cascades down to this October, children grown some on their own, Mary a nurse and ready finally to buy the house she has been dreaming for all these nomadic years, and I, unemployed mostly, feeling about in the dark for a way to paste some sort of living from my fractured passions without losing too much of any of them. So much moving without a lot of getting anywhere.

10/7

Journal Entry:

I was busy yesterday but only in spurts.

Dream #1:

Mary and I trying to sleep on a couch. I touch her gently.

She says, “Maybe we shouldn’t here.”

A frumpy woman, wearing a scarf over her head, enters and begins picking up pieces of white paper off of the burnt orange shag carpet, muttering loudly to herself in a language I can’t understand. All around us blank white walls of a room that is empty except for an brand new black and white portable TV with a ratcheting channel dial, down the adjacent hallway dark veneer paneling looms.

Dream #2:

“Someday I will make it more than just a passive system,” I say talking about a computer to a small vague group of fashionable but casually dressed professionals.

Mary comes in and sits down on the floor facing a small laptop. Everyone nods knowingly. She starts pushing buttons and music emanates from the walls.

“Early Pink Floyd from the Sid Barrett days,” I comment.

My dreams are now in David Lynch color like Blue Velvet.

10/8

Dream:

“Step away from the screen, Mam,” said the female voice of authority coming from outside of the screen door.

“Whose out there?” I ask confused.

“It is Mr. Death.”

I push through the door and see light leaking out from small spaces the wooden steps I am standing on.

“Who’s down in the basement?” I yell through a crack. The words coming out in slow motion through my rubbery lips.

Before this dream dreams about zombies: one with a head like “Eraserhead’s” baby and sitcom housewife zombies trading bites of each other while having a friendly chat.

Posted in Drawing, Dreamtime, Family, House and home, My Art, my life, Of the Road and The River, personal history, Teaching and Learning, Telling Stories, thinking in words, whereever you go there you are, working world | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment