Saturday, July 25, 2009

Remind me.


Leave it to someone with a better footing in the rational world to elucidate the psychological purposes of dreams; I come from a perspective that dictates the less I say the better.

I say that now...

This morning and last night and the night before I tried explaining--with the kind of atmospherically charged frustration attendant in certain phantasms of 20th century Russian painter, Marc Chagall, in which a simple Dikanka farmer, perhaps even on his wedding day--in this case the Dikanka farmer is yours truly, though I waste no time in clarifying I haven't marrying aspirations, abandons the conventions and physical template of space to grasp, as one might, reaching into the bounty of the sky a mylar balloon, the moon itself or some kind of celestial goat to punch in lieu of a living person who might, in response, sue or consult law enforcement, a dream of agonizing spiritual dimensions.

I couldn't capture the essence of this dream. It was all around me, but I felt like I was fumbling with dull buttered lobster mitts. A while ago I half-jokingly offered to sell my hands on account of tough times and I now take that back. It was a dream about a woman falling asleep. But the rest is too elusive. And of course the intercession of the rain--both terrestrially and in the narrative of the dream made my brain shut down in a kind of stunned interjection of wildest natural beauty. One of those moments when you abandon your itinerary and accept the serendipity of your surroundings.

Of little consolation, I remembered the dream I had about Joe B., involving the Herman Melville novella, Billy Budd, in which, with characteristically stoic romanticism, from the bow of Billy's conscripted ship, The Rights of Man, Joe and I regard an enormous News Gothic-style lowercase e sticking up from the sea on the horizon as if it was an iceberg or an island. He explains how it fell from the story, and somehow that's just the most remarkably sad thing I ever heard.

Oddly enough this was just meant to be one of those posts about the shit I bought at Jerry's Records this morning. The big find was a white label copy of Van Morrison's 1967 post-Them solo debut, Blowin' Your Mind. It's just kind of eh, but that tune 'T.B. Sheets' is terrific for a hot summer day when you're penned up inside with a few bottles of cerveza and sweating gratefully over the realization that you are not dying a consumptive tubercular death in a sweat-stained bed.

I found a delirious, raucous Hound Dog Taylor live record, nice mono copy of Chuck Berry's Greatest Hits on the Chess label and a heart-exploding Little Anthony & the Imperials record.

Oh shit, there's also this fantastic Fats Waller record on RCA Victor--his mischievous grin luminescent, like Jackie Gleason's in the intro to The Honeymooners, and a late-60's 45 reissue of Erroll Garner's 'Misty', which I've loved--like many people, ever since seeing the fantastic 1971 Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty For Me. I said to myself, the disc in my hand, someday sooner or later you're gonna feel as dirty and sad as a grizzly bear's asshole. And you're gonna want to hear 'Misty'. So I got that too.

More on the substantiation of the sleeping woman dream as my faculties augur it from the pot tar and too too many late nights boxing it out with the Mule of the Night...