5134. Runaway
… constructed
boxes where things hurry away from their names
Octavio Paz, “Objects & Apparitions,” trans. Elizabeth Bishop
They’re not the only ones: sometimes when we’re together in the little box of a condominium she calls home, my mother’s up and gone somewhere else. (At such times, it feels a little like we’re Mother-and-Son in name only—though so far, she’s always made it back in time for dinner.)
She’s hurried away to another room, or another part of this one, working puzzles on the computer or a little table. She says she does them to keep herself grounded, but I think she’s partly checking flight schedules—plotting her next trip out of the box, or trying to put together what she’ll see once she gets there.
I don’t mind, though: one way or another, I know she’ll find a way to write.
Note: “pilgrim soul” (Yeats, “When You Are Old”).
My mom’s always loved a coffee shop.
5137. Human Landscape
Walking in the winter can be awfully lonely. People naturally retreat into their own shells for protection. It helps to walk with a friend to ward off the loneliness a little. I had a friend who hated the winter as much as I do, and we used to walk a lot together in the cold. Neither of us thought we could stand it, alone. (We’re both from warmer climates.)
One day my friend showed me a painting called Green Sea (maybe to take our minds off winter). It’s a painting of two people walking along the beach. The landscape would look a lot less friendly without those two people walking on it, I thought. My friend went further. He believed you’d actually have some trouble figuring out it was a landscape at all, if it weren’t for those people.
There are a lot of places that you wouldn’t know were fit for human habitation if you didn’t see people inhabiting them.
Note: “Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
Milton Avery, Green Sea (1958)
5139. Interpretation of Dreams
The visions all are fled …
A sense of real things comes doubly strong,
… but I will strive
Against all doubtings …
Keats, “Sleep and Poetry”
I don’t remember my dreams, and certainly wouldn’t expect you to care to hear about them if I did. I have very little interest in the particulars of my own dreams and cannot imagine why anyone else would, either.
Besides, I think I have a pretty good idea of what they’re all about. I think they’re all about getting really close to other people and admitting how much you love them even when you say and feel that you hate them. (Your different feelings for other people get close to one another, too—the way enemies can end up admitting they want to be friends.) And the closeness doesn’t stop there. It just keeps on going. The people you get close to in your dreams also get close to one another: so close that you can’t really tell them apart. (It’s sort of like how close I get to you: sometimes, I can’t tell us apart.)
Closeness like that doesn’t look like it could go on for very long—not much longer than the length of a dream. (Dreams seem to feel that their kind of closeness can’t last. I think that’s what often makes them sad.)
But I believe the closeness may last longer than the dreams that show such closeness appear to think it does. Closeness like that, once it gets started: who’s to say where it ends?
Note: “a tremendous work of condensation” (Freud, “The Dream-Work,” The Interpretation of Dreams).
