#SOL16: Celestial Railroad

from my art journal (August 19, 2016, acrylic paint, marker, pencil, found text, tissue paper, digital remix)

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”  

                        -  Edgar Allan Poe 

 I am concentrating. Concentrating hard while trying not to slip as I step foot over foot over thick snaking cables. I am trying to type the word, expressionist, into a handheld device and I keep screwing it up and having to start again.  

"Shit, I can't get this."

Finally, the letters are in the right order and I press, enter. And this is how the dream begins. 

"Here," I say, handing the person on my right the label that reads, expressionist. "You need to have a label to pass through this here and get on the train." 

I am walking inside what feels like an ultra modern shopping mall. 

"I think you're a painter, like Hans Hoffmann," I add and though I cannot see him, I know that to my right is Rob who now is wearing a badge around his neck.  It reads, expressionist.  

"Do you think I should have written, painter?" I ask him and I don't wait for a response for I somehow know there will be none coming.

Around us are storefronts with very wide sliding glass doors that are all open. And though there is considerable mechanical noise clanking and humming and far-off bells ringing, no one seems open yet for business. There are no smells and I think we must be a great distance from the restaurants. Behind the open sliding doors are partially drawn curtains that do not flutter. They hang, white on white. 

"We must be early as the shopkeepers don't seem to be here yet," I say to Rob.  

And then I notice another person who also seems to be hiking with us. She is young. Her shoulder length hair is streaked with pink and she is wearing a short white robe and lime green sneakers and I think to myself, "Look, she is like a color wheel."  

We are climbing up some kind of narrow  steep walkway. "I think we have found our way into Hawthorne's allegory,"  I say.

It is then that she seems to answer--reciting the opening of a Hawthorne story. "Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction."

"Ah, you've read Hawthorne ,too," I say to her and  it feels like I know her. Like I must know her.

Years earlier when I was just 19, I wrote my senior college paper on Hawthorne and homeopathic medicine. I had spent the semester reading Hawthorne and tracing examples of his character's reliance on homeopathy through key works. "You know Hawthorne's father-in-law was a homeopath," I say aloud. We are heading for a railroad now. "Just up ahead ."

We climb a steeper incline, closer towards what looks like a domed sky. And I trip catching myself before I fall and that's when I realize that interspersed between the cables and rocks are thick clear and blue tubing. 

"Oh no," I say. "Be careful. We are walking on people's oxygen lines and blood lines." 

And I think to myself it is a good thing that none of us are wearing high heals and this causes me to laugh. That's when I notice that what I thought were stores are really rooms with sliding glass doors that are open, like the ones in the intensive care center that Rob stayed in more at the hospital in January and as I realize this the facade of shopping mall begins to fade a bit, fade to white.

We have climbed to the top and there is no where to go and I am nearly pressed to the ceiling standing on a platform and there is no train. Below, a hive of rooms stretch out forever connected by thick tubing that runs in and out of each room. 

"Just like every mall I have ever been to. You think there's going to be an adventure, but there never is," I turn to tell Rob.  He knows how much I dislike malls often complaining that it feels like I cannot breathe. And I want to tell him all of this and more, but Rob is gone.

The young girl is gone too. 

And there is no sky to touch.

The glass dome of the shopping mall fades to white and I start to write.

#SOL16: Secret Desire

from my art journal  - A Change in the Order of Things - May 27, 2016
(gesso, acrylic paint, white and black marker, newspaper, Magritte's writing)

"What echoes in me is what I learn with my body: something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which meanwhile had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation: the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash." - Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, p. 200.

I.

In the dream you are still alive. And although I can see you, I cannot hear you. There is some type of screen between us, a boundary preventing me from reaching out and touching you. The distance keeps me from getting your attention, from saying to you, "Turn around. Speak louder, I cannot hear you."

The dream is a loop that plays the same few frames of film repeatedly.

It is daylight. Bright noon sun. You are sitting on a dock and water surrounds you on three sides. Your head is thrown back and I watch as your shoulders lift and then fall. Lift and fall. And your movement shows me what I cannot hear: You are laughing.

And I think, how familiar. You were always laughing.


II.

The last few hours of your life are so permanently etched in my mind and I have replayed your death over and over again these last three months. I have replayed your death while waiting for coffee to arrive.  While standing in line at the Stop & Shop.  While waiting for Devon to come out from school.  While walking. While falling into meditation. I see your death again and again like a loop I have no will to stop.  The grief counselor I see suggests that I may have a touch of PTSD. And I think she may be right. For what I see again and again is all so clear.

On that unseasonably warm March afternoon with the winter sun falling quickly below the tree line, I watched you die. I held your hand as your jaw loosened, unhinged itself, like a wild bird finally un-trapped. How hard your body worked to die. You were a starling finally given flight. Loosed from the world, a wild thing--I held your hand between both of mine, murmuring sounds of love until I felt your body give way, like daylight to night.

Unmoored, you moved to where I could not follow.The quick fluttering of wings between tree branches.


III.

That which is repeated is its own kind of wonder. This week, the dream comes most nights and I think I must finally be sleeping deeply enough to dream. There in that quasi-twilight before morning fully comes, the birds chirp and chatter call me from the deepness of sleep and I hang on to the bits of what I have been dreaming.

You are still alive. There is a dock. Lake water. I know more than I can say. I hear the water as it moves against the dock, moves against the shore--a lapping sound and behind me there are birds on the wires waiting to lift and I hear the sharp whistling sound of mourning doves as they first find flight.

It is high noon. The sun's warmth against my skin finds me drowsy. You sit on the wood planks, your back is to me. I want to call out to you to turn around, but my voice is mute. I know more than I can say as I watch as your head--tossed back and then forward and then back again and again. I remember that afternoon as we sat in your car so many decades ago and you explained the significance of a möbius strip. And I think now about your death about that one boundary between us.

The flannel shirt, the blue buffalo patterned one you always loved, now pulls at the shoulders each time you laugh, each time your head falls forward. I think how strange to see you in that shirt.  I want to tell you that earlier in the week I donated all of your clothes and kept two of your flannel shirts to wear--and one is the shirt you are wearing.


IV.

When I wake, I look for you and see I am in bed, alone. I turn towards the windows and the sun leaks through the closed blinds, lightening the walls. Daylight has come and now early morning finds the walls a soft rose. I retell the dream and wonder, What does it all mean? What is its significance? What might it signify?

But I am still sleepy and these questions not for a Sunday morning when feeling drowsy feels right. Beside the bed is a book of poems you gave me. I find my reading glasses and then open to a folded page you must have turned down at some earlier time. It pleases me to think of your fingers touching the page I am now touching--your eyes reading the words I am reading--your voice sounding the poem as my voice does too.

You have woken up late,

lost and perplexed

but don't rush to your books

looking for knowledge.

Pick up the flute instead and

let your heart play.

 (by Rumi, from Hidden Music, p. 158)

And I wonder if you have left this page folded for me to find.


V.

Outside, the birds call more insistently to one another. I wish I knew what they were saying. I wish I talked bird. I smile thinking how you too would have liked to speak such language. And laughing at the folly of such foolish things, I say after this year we have each earned a boon.

So, here's a secret for a Sunday morning.

Since your death, I have wanted to commune with you again, to boldly smash through that screen that separates us, and turn on its head the order of things as we have known it. Foucault was right. The order is arbitrary, Capricious, even.

Let's talk through dreams. Let's let this dream keep me company as I ready to walk. The dream replays like a song known for a long, long time. A familiar tune I can hum.

It plays upon my heart like a lover, slowly awakening this body.

#SOL15: My Husband Dreams of Different Neighborhoods

My husband dreams of different neighborhoods where we have lived some with railroad tracks and others with roads that wind past the front door of a house disappearing like trees in fog. And in one neighborhood our dog, Max, is lost and is wandering. A UPS truck driven by itself turns a corner. And now both  the dog and the truck are coming down the road and Max waits at a corner for the truck to pass and as it does, he's transformed into a man driving a Dodge Dart.

This is the way it is.

All the while, snow blankets the ground.

Crowd-Sourcing Dreams

It's not that Seth Godin is saying anything novel.  But it is that he is leveraging via his appeal and his connections a will for others to think about learning and public schooling. I'm half-way through Godin's manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams and want to recommend that you take a couple of hours and read it and then get some others to do so as well and then let's talk about it and see what we can put together and what we can dismantle.

I know that a lot of artists stop by my blog and so I am appealing especially to you.  Godin says that an artist "is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better" (section 39).  I think we know that and certainly I recognize those qualities and actions in the work and heart of so many of you.

Godin writes (from section 39):

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists
and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into
their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly
pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give
them a platform to do it. 

The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.

I have invited Arne Duncan to a Google hangout I plan to host to discuss the manifesto and what in our national ed plan is supportive of a pedagogy of dreams and what is in the way of children dreaming powerfully.  I'll post the date and time and let you know.

CrowdSourceLove: Day 10 - Dream Together

Note: As a lead in to Valentine's Day I will be posting some ways that convey I love you that do not rely on purchasing gifts and am inviting you to do the same where you blog.  If you make a post could you link it to this post?  At the end of two weeks I am curious as to what interconnected posts about love we might make collectively.

In the Field (M.A.  Reilly, 2012)

On this last CrowdSourceLove,  I wanted to leave you with something that might extend well beyond Valentine's Day and thought about the necessity to dream, to share those dreams with the ones we love, and to dream together.  Many years ago I had the opportunity to read Together--a lovely book-length picture book poem by George Ella Lyon.  

The poem reads:

You cut the timber and I'll build the house.

You bring the cheese and I'll fetch the mouse.

You salt the ice and I'll crank the cream.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

I'll drive the truck if you'll fight the fire.

I'll plunk the keys if you'll be the choir.

I'll find the ball if you'll call the team.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

You dig for water and I'll make a pail.

I'll paint the boat if you'll set the sail.

You catch the fish and I'll catch the stream.

Let's put our heads together and dream the same dream.

Putting your heads together to dream the same dream.
A fine way to live and love.