14 September 2011
Dream journey: An Armory-like art show that I entered with a friend in the evening, someone who goes to these things infrequently. It was based in an old Gothic revival campus that was otherwise unused, either out of session or permanently, and the surrounding area that was landscaped into wooded paths like a zoo. The first exhibition I entered in the zoo area was a tea garden and plantation house with a field of plastic leaves. There was a tour of the plantation house with free tea, and a place to sit that was more like a cafeteria than a tea house, where a guy who was dispensing napkins at the table and selling $30 plastic sculptures affected that he was the gallery owner but that he was too coy to say so, but I decided later he wasn't. The young man said "my job is to make you endure the impossibilities" and "joy is what you feel when you have expended all anguish." There was then a corridor with smaller galleries which repeated shows I was familiar with, until the heart of the campus where the Gothic revival brick and ivy dorms had large DayGlo insects climbing up them, and a cartoon animal that was going to jump off a balcony with cartoon animals on the ground consoling it with a trampoline, again things I considered predictable. The campus had a large chapel, and the interior was impressively covered with video screens of mostly abstract, kaleidoscopic patterns, and mechanical works by five different artists. I went to a rest room and a trio of women were making cryptic jokes about being on hallucinogens and going to the woods to do more and I spoke to them briefly. Then I entered a corridor and every one in attendance was made to crowd into that single corridor, and I made a loud joke and no one laughed. Then we were made to get on buses for reasons I wasn't told, and basically drove around the block for a half hour and returned to the show. On the bus there was the view of a walking area by a river that had long been out of style, with people trying to rent out paddle boats and no customers, and there were about 12 floating art works in different directions that could be seen from the bus, 9 kites and several other mechanisms.
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I was staying in another town with a literary couple I arrived with, and I was unpacking a box of books I had brought from a storage area I hadn't been to lately and found that the host had a paperback volume of Henry James' dream diary. The idea of Henry James' dream diary is what I consider the highlight of this reminiscence but you can read on. It wasn't called a diary and the actual title escapes me. Eventually a room I thought was unused was filled with people in folding chairs. They were facing a partial wall, and to the right of it was a plastic tub where an elderly former co-worker was all white and bathing in a blue solution carefully tended to by a doctor in attendance. His limbs didn't seem to be all attached and he was skeletal but tender. He said "I told you Ian you eat eggs too often" and referred to other advice he would give me, not inclined to spit it out easily and chiding me if I gave up on the lecture. Turning to the people in the folding chairs I started a chant of his name which became rather loud as the people seemed to have little else to do. I thought, of course, that this crowd scene was distracting me from my weekend with the couple and sought them out, and they were hurriedly making some plans, and then I think I woke up.
maybe 200 people in all, with an aisle between them
actually James had museum dreams as he recounts in his autobiography. This doesn't make me less embarrassed about my museum dreams, more. In fact, my museum dreams are quite Jamesean.. I don't have ludid dreams about the Louvre but there are larger Roman ruins in Paris.. near here there is a preserved interior of hall late Romanesque/ early Gothic, all white, perhaps relocated but disused, which I always say I will return to. The fact that most of the museums have contemporary design doesn't help the situation.
I shouldn't say I don't want the same dreams as James, just cuz he's been shoved down everyone's throat, couldn't happen to a better.. But I just like to be original.
the co-worker's name was one syllable, so the crowd had a unified fist gesture for emphasis
since these posts I found another museum map with notes in it. I'm going to put them all in Henry James books from now on, had one next to where I was sitting
Delightful migration of what I think were crows two hours ago, though none of them came close enough for better ID. There were either thousands of them or they gave me that impression by flying in circles.
James recounted dreams where he chased a monster through the Louvre, for those of you on the two day non sequitur wait.
I heard good news today.. I have been a bit on edge in recent weeks, if you find me entertaining in that disposition so do I, but the whole package wears on me.
I suspect females behave differently in my dreams than in Jamesian dreams, and my motivation for saying so is of the most contemptable, provincial football on Sunday sort, but beyond that the contrast is interesting to me in reflection. I don't speak of their behavior here, of course, not that kind of blog.
There were crows close to the ground at the lunch hour that announced themselves in large number as crows. Then there were utterances that accompanied my attempt at an epiphany, not boredom but some more remote motivation, a Puerto Rican or Dominican construction worker named Ian that was getting yelled at. There are always dogs about so I pretended it was Virgil speaking, and if the instructions disappointed me I had only my own methods, not to blame but to transfer to text and their reverberations. Then the rain and the machines not stopping for the rain.
My status as passive observer in previous dreams was critiqued in ways fairly or unfairly either way I wouldn't type or I could contrive that it was some sort of celebration, even then of the mundane sort. There was a large warehouse once used for engines in Eastern Europe but I noticed that it was still used for engines in addition to its new cultural purpose, that noticing such a contrivance.
Folks were determined to visit a Manhattan shoe store which they thought had memorabilia from musicians that the store owners had known back in the day. When we got there there were about three or four dusty pairs of shoes for sale on a mostly empty rack in the middle of the floor, though the racks of mementos were there for people to mull, the daughter of the shoe store family attended to the room with an anachronistic voice I became fascinated with.
Lots of crows above my lunch: I am enjoying their returnings. I have always related Van Gogh's crows in my mind to Fontana's holes in the canvas except the crows are more of a representation of the holes in seeing of which mortality is the largest hole.
Dream had interesting aspects I was trying to remember but the impulse to say Goodbye to All That without the Robert Graves expansiveness was strong enough to wrest me from recollections.
I don't have dreams of towers or flying on airplanes. Maybe there are some dreams of the interior of the plane, the difficulty in getting from here to there, but not dreams where I'm looking out the window. I do fly but I tend to float about five feet off the ground, a sort of prance that slowly allows me to stay in the air until I choose to step on the ground or I float on the ceiling. I have had lucid dreams of looking down at an art installation that way, where objects are strewn on the floor and there is a kinetic diorama of fire replete with creatures unconsumed under an old mantlepiece from the gallery's previous use, floating past booths attached to its anteroom from which people are telling fortunes which I cannot hear because you must be touching the ground to enter the booth.
I was looking at the crows in Winslow Homer's Fox Hunt yesterday at PAFA.. you can see the face of what wants to devour you but not the face of will-to-becoming
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