ANOTHER 'GET OUT OF BED AND WRITE THIS MESS DOWN' DREAM...THAT, OTHERWISE, WOULD HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN....THEN, LATER, MANIFEST IN SOME OTHER DREAM.......AS SUBCONSCIOUSNESS LEAKS INTO PRETERNATURAL SURREALISM..........

 Within seconds, chunks of this Dream had already left....returning to the cloistering of similarities within whatever storage areas of my brain that semi-conscious sequences of images and sounds allow residence to them......From the bits and pieces that remain in short term memory:    

"It' is, simultaneously, both a quarter of a century ago and "Now', which is just an assemblage of 'Thens', 'Perhaps', and "Inventions of Artful Recollections"......as I exit the passenger side of a 1966 Chevrolet Caprice, driven  by my absent-minded Mother, who hands me an umbrella, exactly the color (blue-green-gray) as the vehicle,  admonishing me to 'not get the chair wet.."......Then, I am aware that I am lugging one of my parents' mahogany dining room chairs....for unknown reasons.....from the car...now parked in a 'parking area' next to a popular restaurant in Huntsville, Alabama.......sorta like "Fisherman's Wharf", although that is just a nomenclature that pops up to satisfy my Mind's prerequisite to 'label....thus know' what 'Is' and 'What's going on"......So.......as my mother parks the car a couple of blocks away, to avoid having to pay a parking lot attendant $6 to do so, then after lunch, having to validate the meal receipt to save the $5/hr parking 'fee'......I enter the restaurant....carrying the heavy dining room chair.......Within the 'restaurant' is a desk, behind which is a cashier holding a big, rubber stamp in one hand and an ink pad in the other......Above the cashier's head....a sign,  saying:  "If you have a chair, please take the elevator....otherwise,  wait to be seated.".......So, I press the "UP" button,  and after an 'elevator-full of people' exit, enter the elevator, which is an exact duplicate of the first elevator that I 'rode'.....at Dunavant's Department Store, in 1949......the same elevator operator, suddenly, appears.....seated on a black enamelled swing-out seat.......looking just now....in this dream, anyway, like Lily Tomlin as Ernestine....the elevator operator.......'Going up?' she asks......odd, since there was not evidence of either a 'down' button outside....although, within the elevator compartment there was a bronze lever that could be moved to 'up' or 'down' via a bakelite knob, held in 'Ernestine's white-gloved hand......{bits of the dream forgotten, missing, repressed........the story proceeds},,,,,the mechanical doors open to reveal a big sign that says 'THRIFT STORE LEVEL......EMPLOYEES AND DONORS ONLY!'........I exit, carrying the chair, and walk down a long, straight corridor, lined with many identical doors.....some open, some, ajar, and some closed.........Dozens of women and gay men appear,  with arms full of old clothes, toys, sculptures/paintings.....well, all sorts of 'old, discarded stuff'......I recognize just about everyone of these....they are familiar faces of people that I've seen, working, in the many Thrift Stores that I've 'been in' during my Lifetime.......Immediately, all of these people transform into hospital-uniformed doctors, nurses and attendants wearing little caps and hats.........I become anxious and enter an open door, where I discover, seated in a tiny room, an old tap dance teacher from Elementary School, reading a huge magazine entitled, boldly, "A Novice's Guide to Surrealist Sculpture and Dynamism", from which he......now the only 'real' friend that I had in 2nd Grade.......looks up and declares 'fancy seeing you here....nice chair..'......Aware of the heavy chair, I drop its legs to the floor and drag it, as it gets heavier and heavier, from this cubicle to a large room, lined with tall,  draped windows, within which the thrift shop workers, having replaced the 'hospital crew',  are arranging furniture to move into the 'Sales Area'......Tired of carrying around the chair, I hide it behind a velvet drape, that...when I move it to cover the chair, allows some bright light into the cavernous room......{more bits, forgotten/deleted.....}  I journey down the corridor, taking paths suggested by the seeming/suggested  itineraries of the increasingly populated area.........exiting through an arch/door into an immense Arena, full, will thousands of people carrying chairs of every kind.......Then,  realizing that I was...now......'chairless'........I tried to remember my way back to 'where I'd left the old mahogany dining room chair'....Arriving 'there'......the curtain was still drawn back, it's 'too long' length preventing its closure, since it's bottom was piled on the floor where the chair had been........Then, I awaken, with great anxiety, perspiring and breathing heavily.......and begin typing the detritus of dreaming......

 

125 Drafts....to work, toward 'completion'.....This morning, working on a dozen of these writing/imaging Projects....I fell into slumber, from not having slept the night 'away'......During this brief tourney between awakening consciousness and slumberland 'dreaming' .....it 'seemed', to the 'always awake' part of my brain, that the 'always asleep' part was trying to erase the prestidigitations of Art, and replace these remunerations for creative Thought...with more mundane considerations.......In the Dream, within a dream, contained by the 'freezing' of my body's involvement with sleep-walking and semi-conscious scribbling, by the light of a 2 1/2 watt yellowish light, coming through the galley windows of a childhood metal ship's portholes.....enough interplay between light and shadow passed through my thin upper eyelids to initiate a sequence of 'dream images' and faint, but 'present' motion......Then, within the dream that was being 'disassembled and obliterated', arose another dream, that....awakening with startled apprehension, tearing off the cloak of repressive chemistry that the New Brain casts about the old, reactive gizzard of the 'Old Brain'....I emerged from the imagined respite of Slumberland, with a clear and highly-detailed story, complete with pictures and sounds, but lacking dialogue.....but, as I reached for a pen and a notepad to scribble the shorthand trail of crumbs...back to the 'Story', now retreating to the dark, unconscious inner sanctum of electrically-charged tissues, wrapped in that bony cage.....It was gone! Nowhere to be 'seen'......I am determined to 'get There', nevertheless.....Already, even awake, under the influence of Java, bits and pieces are coalescing....Then, I will manifest all of 'this/that with the glue of creative imagining....The agents of repression and sublimation will, I'm certain, demand that I immolate the product of such expression....paper in fire...or just in frustrating 'crumbling'....tossed to the trash can......

1945-6...... MY INTRODUCTION TO MECHANICAL MOTION ASSISTANCE....AS I HOLD ON TO MY KNITTED CHAPEAUX...WHICH I STILL HAVE, THREE QUARTERS OF A CENTURY LATER........

FROM A 16MM SCANNED NEGATIVE THAT I JUST DISCOVERED IN AN OLD KODAK ENVELOPE, DATED OCT. 14, 1946.....WITH 'RECEIPT' FOR $1.20/2 ROLLS OF FILM.....PRINTED......THE PRINTS ARE 'LONG GONE', BUT THE NEGATIVES WERE STILL IN THE ENVELOPE.....

MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO POETRY.....WE HAD TWO VOLUMES OF CHILDREN"S POETRY BY ROBERT LEWIS STEVENSON IN THE SHELVES AT THE HEAD OF MY CHILDHOOD BED.........IT WAS POETRY THAT I READ OR WROTE.......A COUPLE OF YEARS BEFORE "PROSE".........

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

BEFORE IT'S ALL FORGOTTEN AND NO SEARCH CAN REDISCOVER THE LOST VOYAGE WITHIN SEMI-CONSCIOUSNESS......

Already, but....fortunately, not 'completely',  the surrealist 'momentary journey' through the illusory clouds of last night's dream.....well, that part, before the dawn of awakeness, anyway....(and, I can tell, already, that this is going to be both difficult to reassemble and uncertainly vaguely  twisting and turning back into the folds of my old brain's convolutedly semi-comprehensible foldings, short-circuits and dead ends) {c'mon, c'mon....cold-dripped coffee, octane-boosted with black strap molasses, cinnamon bark and honey-drippings}.....No!  Stop!  (while it's still in unsustained focus)    A scene:   Annette Bening, in her Merteul drag, alternating/looping and oscillating/channelling Barbara Land, Sarah Turner and Myra Langtry.....desperately going through a rusting rack of my old theatrical costumes that  hanging, within this sequence,  in tall, vertical trunk drawers...imaged from an old Cocteau/Bunuel-Dali Film .......her tight, aubergine pig-skin gloves with enormous pearl buttons through failing fabric.....attempting to remove a medieval laced restraining corset, overlaid with Battenburg lace.....as it disintegrates in her gloved fingers,,,,,The revolving door, one side of what had been the 'closet',  responding to Annettes desperation, turning transformationally,  into the World on The Other Side, as the Frame falls away....and I am 'camera-drawn' into The Interior.......disappointedly, a Suburban Model Home of Vast Size, performed in synthetic marble and plastic granite, plastic pilasters and painted foam-core Renaissance Arches.....Arletty flashes by, wearing her costume from the Funambules' crowd scene of Children Of Paradise,  where I first met her......Annette had 'become' Garance.....and was distracting me from Concentration by magically changing Baptiste into Peter Turner, oscillating with scratched, fading 16mm frames with disintegrating acetate sprockets....of all the beautiful men whose images are recorded in the lizard memory folds of my 'old' brain.........THEN, awakening with moist forehead and crusty eyes, in this morning's 'real world', having rolled in the turmoil of soon-to-have-been somnambulist wandering across the clunky robot watch that I'd taken from my wrist and tossed to my mattress.......Ouch!.....right on that festering mole on my back!.......So....up, to get a tube of analgesic to quell this refocusing of attention.......hearing nightbirds singing through the gaping hole in the walll....I realized that I was NOT awake, but STILL within the Dream Within A Dream, when Annette, now calm from her frustrated attempts to don the antique corset, gathered me up in her Aura, as I spun in some opium cloud, falling through the clouds, hand-in-hand with 'Smike', whom I had to protect from injury and we were directed, via megaphone,  by Nick Nickleby.........The Marbles were rolling.......a Voice....that of an annoying 'narrator' in some Pop Film that had not the intelligence of good screen-writing, so required constant plot explanation from Reese Witherspoon and Matt Damon, co-joined, like Tweedle-De and Dum.......Of course, this is a Dream.....and, occasionally, aware....even within the dream or the Dreams within those......I could, semi-consciously, redirect the Confusions to simpler paths of Forking Paths rather than incomprehensible metaphoric, seemingly random excursions,  each falling from the cliffs of others, through the countless opening/closing doors/windows into the kernal of repressed memories and suppressed emotions.....Fuck!....I must be Awake, now!.....I'm beginning to analyze this Mess that I awakened from, just in time to hear the mounting wall of vehicle noise, vibrating the loose tin flashing on the other side of my bedroom wall........I'll go down and 'write this down'....which I'm doing, now.....before it vanishes....and is replaced with some memory of having spent the night peeling radishes and stuffing celery stalks with cheese and pimentos........The Stomach Rules........supplanting Emotional Hunger.......Sliced, candied beef tongue with roasted yellow corn!.......Whew.....that was in the 'other feature'......with Julia Childs, played...in drag...by Andrew Zimmern......O.K.  I'll give up that memory, if I could fill the emptied space with the rest of the Annette Bening Saga........