When Dreams Are Broken
Tuesday, September 09, 2014
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| Lathyrus odoratus September 6, 2014 |
Afterglow
Jorge Luís
Borges 1923
Siempre es
conmovedor el ocaso
por
indigente o charro que sea,
pero más
conmovedor todavía
es aquel
brillo desesperado y final
que
herrumbra la llanura
cuando el
sol último se ha hundido.
Nos duele
sostener esa luz tirante y distinta,
esa
alucinación que impone al espacio
el unánime
miedo de la sombra
y que cesa
de golpe
cuando
notamos su falsía,
como cesan los sueños
cuando sabemos que soñamos.
Afterglow
Sunset is always
disturbing
Whether theatrical or
muted,
But still more
disturbing
is that last desperate
glow
that turns the plain
to rust
when on the horizon
nothing is left
of the pomp and clamor
of the setting sun.
How hard holding on to
that light, so tautly drawn and different,
That hallucination
which the human fear of the dark
Imposes on space
And which ceases at
once
The moment we realize
its falsity,
The way a dream is
broken
The moment the sleeper
knows he is dreaming.
It is patently obvious
that poets have a knack of telling us things that should be self evident. They
are not. In the last few months I have been in turmoil thinking about that line
(look it up in the English version above) so beautiful in Spanish:
como cesan
los sueños
cuando
sabemos que soñamos.
Dreams and dreaming
have been especially with me in the last couple of years when old age finds
ways of often interrupting my sleep. Going back to bed before that (after an
occasional visit to the bathroom) I would think, “Death cannot be like sleep.
The pleasure in sleeping is waking up or waking up in the middle of the night
and knowing that I will sleep again, to wake again.” Death cannot thus be like
sleep. It is terminal.
Consider Phillip K.
Dick’s short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? One step further from
that is, “Do we dream when we are dead?”
As an aside before I
continue here is one of my fave sentences from Dick’s story:
“I like her; I could
watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”
That reminds me of my
friend John Lekich once saying about Anne McAuley who worked at the Dianne
Farris Gallery, “She is the only woman I know whose breasts blush.” We often
visited the gallery but not to see the art on the wall.
My dreams are now more
visceral. I remember more of them because I wake up more often. When I turn off
the light at night I feel like I am in a film theatre. The lights fade, the
curtain opens and who knows what will be projected?
I have nagging
suspicions (not confirmed by research in the internet) that my dreams indicate
an encroaching Alzheimer’s.
I sometimes wonder if
looking back at memories, imagining the smell of sweet peas, or reading a book
read more than once is not some variation of a dream.
As a little boy I
lusted over Susan Stone. I was 9 so I had no idea what lusting was or meant. I
would go to sleep and attempted to put myself in dreams where Susan was ever
pleasant to me. These attempts never went anywhere because I invariably fell
asleep. I learned then that dreams were random even though some of them
happened after events of note and replicated them in some way.
I could tell you that
last night I dreamt that I was listening to Schmelzer’s Trio Sonatas as played by
the London Baroque Orchestra while scanning Rosemary’s sweet peas. I could tell
you that before that, when I knew I was going to scan the sweet peas that I went
to my William Carlos Williams – Selected Poems to look for this one:
Smell!
Oh strong-ridged and
deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what
will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we
are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate,
always unashamed,
and now it is the
souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering
pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With
what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a
passing springtime!
Can you not be decent?
Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less
unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think,
if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste
everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part
in everything?
But no. I would be lying.
To dream all of the above would be a dream that upon waking would vanish as only
Borges knew, and so now, do I.
But all that does not prevent me from daydreaming about the smell of a sweet pea and why it is that although it does not have the complexity of a rose or a Southern Magnolia, they (the sweet peas) trump them all in reality and in that memory of my nose that Williams Carlos Williams so well defines.
