One can never be sure if a Dream
Song is from a dream or if it’s just the capture of the normal vapors that
shimmer through our brains during unremarkable quotidian meditations,
distractions and daydreams. The first two stanzas involve a woman—gazing at
her, imagining, I think, the snowy whiteness of her breasts (“although I have
not been there”), assessing what he has in common with her, letting it all go.
It makes me retreat a bit to engage with this business, but it’s pretty mild,
and of course it’s a familiar element of human experience that these hot little
swirling dust devils can blow through our heads at any moment. They make us
cough, bring an irritated tear or two leaking from the corners of our eyes, and
they twist away having done no damage. If only I had never seen his photograph
and thus didn’t know how damn ugly the guy was. Let it blow and squirm away,
over the sun-baked chaparral and forlorn bouncing tumble weeds…
The real point is this: “Dream on
of a private life but you won’t make it / your fated life is public.” So he hopes, actually. We’ve been over
this. The only reason he’s not swooping in on the woman and suggesting they do
with one another in a sexualized embodied private is because he can’t, his body
dissolving from abuse. So the human being in a failing human body, failing
because of dangerous human addictions, compensates with intensity where able:
Teacher, lecturer, writer, and thus arises out of this the virtual “Henry,”
floating in Dream Songs through a Dream World. One of the main compensations of
this invented place is that it flows through time differently, being
disembodied, or un-bodied, and thus has a shot at sticking around longer than
the doomed and bodied human otherwise might. “You lie uneasy whom we all
endear.” I’m saying it: “lie” is meant on one level as “recumbent”, “in a state
of horizontal repose”, and it leads to an ordinary enough metaphoric phrase, to
“lie uneasy”, but I more than suspect that the pun on it is the real if subtly hidden
point: A “lie” is an untruth. The thing about a virtual existence is that it’s
virtual, which is to say, unreal. Untrue. A lie. All this fame stuff: Really? Isn’t that a bit of a risk? It
is. Except the addicted here-and-now is even ghostlier, and ghastly, because what’s
real involves pain, weakness, blank stretches of alcoholic oblivion or blank
stretches of oblivious, white hospitals, with efficient, cold white nurses.
Dream on, then. “When storms come down from the mountains,” like dust devils,
but with some heft and punching wind, and lightning. A bit more vigor than the
wisps that set up the poem, true. But it’s the dog who gets the last line. The
dog is not bothered with virtual nonsense. He munches his bone—securely embodied,
focused on his now-bone. And—by the way—a whole hell of a lot happier in his
innocent doggie way: Crunch—intoxicating, complex smell of cow—slobber—bliss. Bliss. A bliss incomprehensibly out of
reach for the likes of a mere art-Dreamer.
"The sky begins to blond." That's a winner.
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