in the hall of mirrors

In the night

Amidst all this dim worrying and occasional working, and as the nights draw in, and everything transforms to winter – I keep thinking: I'm much more interested in my dreaming life, and sleeping, than I am in my waking life. This isn't because I remember many of my dreams, nor because those have some powerful heroic narrative in comparison to my rather disappointing waking life (as in Thurber's Walter Mitty, or perhaps Gaiman's A Dream Of You); but simply because there seems to be much more feeling and reality in dreams, at least for me.

Waking therefore in the middle of the night, unable to sleep for a while: for some reason I've been led, either in dreaming or in waking or some fuzzy interface between the two, to imagine myself now, but different – still older, a bit sad, a bit reserved, still with many of the same mistakes and stupid life accidents of the past years; but living in San Francisco again, and relating to younger, more energetic gay guys as a quiet bystander. And imagining therein some sense of kindly, rather patronizing affection from those younger ones – and feeling part of a community....

Along with this imagined context, I'm getting flashes of some of the interesting, bizarre guys I knew in San Francisco – discussions, lofts, tangential connections with lives that were so different that they are hard for me to imagine. And it's a bit frustrating to try to remember the details of what I did see – it's a good thing I write now, I really have a flimsy memory.

An amazingly different feeling of life, a different balance, a different sense of my surroundings, and of myself. At least in my (admittedly wistful) imagination.

Dream transformation

A dream, wherein a lesbian relationship which is undergoing changes has been transferred to someone else in my life (I won't say more, as it would be embarrassing for the parties involved – it has, after all, nothing to do with the people who inhabit the waking world).

I ask the older woman about the younger one, who has clearly moved on; she says something about wishing for a great love, a great happiness, that is ‘uninterrupted by the lover’. I hear sad string music, and am sorry for her as I put away a great deal of tissue paper, all wrinkled by having been wrapped around things in suitcases and boxes.

The tone of the dream is very poignant, with lots of sympathetic affection for the sadness of the woman: perhaps because she is older, and looking back on the possibility of love, now lost. And perhaps this is transferred grieving over the impossibility of love with a man I met yesterday....

Taproot

One finds roots in unexpected places.

Perhaps the news is that my week of external living, of administration and people and students and responsibilities, has also sounded some deeper places, unexpectedly.

The body of the dream is mostly forgotten – perhaps it's summed up as a vacation that goes wrong – a room in a Spanish villa, some sort of gay bed and breakfast, but midway through the vacation I decide that this is all pointless and I will go home.

But for some reason I change my mind, and come back to the villa, without any luggage, for one last day: and I arrive to unlock my otherwise bare room, the one I'd already left, just as a young man whom I know is delivering the mail – and for some reason my mail includes papers, photocopies, rare materials from my Darmstadt researches, especially related to Schnebel (and that suggests a symbolic connection, as Schnebel is certainly the kindest and wisest, the most supportive, of the composers I've worked with – it's not trivial that he was a minister before he was an artist). When I go into the room, which should be empty, there is another box on the bed of similar materials, which were delivered by people who thought I'd still be there – I realize how lucky it is that I came back, that these precious papers didn't go astray in the international mails, and then am explaining to someone just why they are precious to me....

Strange. And it may seem dull, to a non-scholar; but it had the nimbus of a good dream, of the dream that reminds you what you love, what you do. And it is a clear response to the frustrations of the past week – not to mention a clear answer to last night's frantic exchange of e-mails, where we learned that our Darmstadt collection must be finished in the next ten days....

[Artwork by Polish artist Jacek Yerka.]

On reflection

The formal articulation of so much mental garbage does tend to leave me thinking I'm being rather silly. I mean, you'd think that at my age I would remember that the best solution to being unproductive/unfulfilled/unexcited is just to get on with it.

A dream this morning, clearly grown from my concerns of the past weeks: something about being disastrously late with homework... which is perhaps the truth about my life. And, as I bark at my postgraduate and senior students and get them to outdo themselves by simply insisting that they make it to the deadline and do the best they can, clearly I need to do some of that for myself....

Next (above) post: one of my favorites of my own poems. Hey, it won an award (from a gay newspaper in San Francisco, the Sentinel, some time in the early 1990s, when poetry about AIDS and mourning was especially common). Anyway: I like it.

Blur

In between yesterday's mix of effectiveness and dilatoriness, and the future... and a long, intricate dream, which had me visiting a Los Angeles that turned into Hong Kong, trying to find my way to the northwest (which was, however, in the northeast), a large shopping mall, and casually talking to a German guy (who turned out to be British?) who works at the University of Hong Kong. Where I used to work....

Confused. Telling dreams is irritating, I know. No more real details, but it had a strong sense of being about the past, the lost past (the confusion of the map and trying to find my way), and the embarrassment, envy and frustration of explaining why I no longer lived or worked in a given place, of not being successful in this academic world, where minor failure is both so common and also loaded with too much meaning.

Woke to the murky, slightly whiny music I heard yesterday morning – at first I thought it was some really annoying record being played by the transient girl downstairs; but finally realized it was the blond, tattooed kid next door practicing his guitar and singing. Well, if he's practicing then, it's all right – indeed it's a good thing (I will confess, however, to uncharitable thoughts around his inability to sing quite up to pitch – flatness seems to be eternal).

Anyway: I hope he knows how important it is that he should do that same phrase, over and over, with the dedication of getting it right... the best way to avoid having a misspent life....

Dreams II

Not yet asleep, his house, his bed, I breathe
His skin, reshape my legs to fit his legs;
But when I leave the waking dark to feel
Another air, I’m faithless to this place:

Dream buildings.  See, they rise with radiant walls,
Yet skeletally, fling steel bones from earth
To air, float nets of brick and painted wood
On broad, calm lakes of plaster framed with sky –

Tall homes, night visible inside, whose rooms
Change shape: doors vanish, melt to curtained traps,
Blue mirrors glint with eyes that trace the path,
The hidden latch to open secret stairs...

When morning falls, I’ll start awake to rise
And smile, as though I never left his house.

[Los Angeles, 12/18/91-6/19/92]

The hillside

'And I fell asleep and had this dream':

after continuing to read about awareness, eternity, and timeless responses to tragedy or despair in the Upanishads and Buddhism and Taoism;

after the last in a long chain of long days of meetings, tired of but not upset about so many things, and after some champagne (the farewell reception for Religious Studies, in a context of hearing startlingly bitter farewell speeches) and wine (dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, where they always treat me like family, where I had a brief discussion with the waiter of our mutual reactions to death, loss and return in Solaris):

A dream, almost without incident, but all made out of a single incident – a single process, with the kind of magical aura that would make Jungians consider it a 'deep' dream – in this case almost without embellishment, the most naked of processes, perfect, clear and reassuring, almost startlingly stripped of unnecessary detail or story.

On a hillside near where I grew up – as it so happens, on the hill where the house stood of those neighbors who, mysteriously enough, had as a family name my own first name – I was friends with their middle son, whose first name the same as my father's, and my brother's – all very confusing, I'm sure, for me as a young child; and of course rather obviously now, from a dream point of view, intended to point back directly at me, in the most arresting way –

a dream of a vast year's process of planting, summer, winter; of the empty hillside with the tiniest of seedlings, then a long process of growth into a thick harvest, then rains and water pouring down the hill in literally torrential floods (that vast flooding: I must have been so impressed, when I was five or six, at the changes in weather when they turned to snow, ice or water, and ran down that steep, long hill near my parent's house – an entire street, Overlook Drive, had been built along a deep ravine, and many of our neighbors lived in houses at the top of long steep stretches of ground): and change, and the death of all the plants, but with the knowledge of their return. All of this blended in what was almost a long stop-action movie in a single arch, which felt both like a travelogue, and also like an experience, as if I were born to this change, to this harvest, as someone who knew these plants and their cycle intimately.

I told you it was obvious. But how extraordinarily powerful, nevertheless....