In Dreams...
This from the journals of a member of higher public profile than usual for a post. He's good for mornings where there's no tasting your food - and as a reminder to us that champagne and expatriotism don't always mix. To preserve anonymity we'll just call him D.H.
The queen-bee is showering. I am back in bed, alone for the first time since her yesterday's bathing. My head aches and when I look toward last night I see only black, blue, red in black, brown, white, gold. One’s hat pulled low, another’s chest puffed out.
Last night’s dream is equally present. I look toward it and see black, red, gold, black, white. La même chose, as they say here. My dream continued the night like a bark continues its progress after the cutting of the engine. Symbols changed form but not color, and so the ugly restlessness of the evening found no respite when I lay my head upon her chest to sleep.
Now, in memory, the dream preceeds its parent. She was driving my automobile back in a dream-England- an impossibility- so naturally we were waived to the side of the road by some enforcer of the law. Quickly, in the gold-lit, black-framed cabin, we switched seats so that I would take the blame and she keep her foreign papers unblemished.
Thus all blame was placed on me, and fragile love fell away as it could not keep me from the jailer. The rest of the dream, its body, was my 25th hour, my rebuke of the world in the moment of bidding it goodbye, a hot-faced pulling-shut of a door before it could be slammed in my face.
And of course the sensation of a slamming is the left-over of the evening spent prior to the dream. “We’re on vacation!” So she wanted to go to a cafe. “We’re in a café” so we ought to drink champagne. In time we were joined by others- filthy French, gaudy Italians- and I had endure the ordeal of her transformation, via champagne and mania, into a public being. After several glasses she was a marionette on strings tied to every point in the room. She tittered this way and that, a grotesque narration. Worst of all, whenever I caught her eye with my parched, longing, dead-weight gaze she looked away instantaneously, registering only the desperate need to turn from me. What depths this sent my mind into, I have learned to spare even myself the recounting.
And if this were not sufficient to fold my brain inward, I witnessed, as a sort of cabaret accompaniment to this act, the gypsy trumpet player send her into an hysterics that built and redoubled in time with his rising musical onslaught in a manner so sexual that I almost dumped her off my lap, feeling her convulsing there so similarly to sex-times. Making love to music. Touched by nothing but the air. My god.
This morning we drank red orange juice in wine glasses on the veranda. Dawn was more gold than apple green. I asked her to explain her darting eyes. She said, "Darling, I wasn’t looking at anything. I simply couldn’t." And that laugh? "Why, it was my own hysterics that drove me further, I wasn’t listening to a note that man was playing." I folded my napkin. I looked away, at whatever found itself beyond the railing. I knew she was looking at me to see if I believed her. I did. And so I felt better, or rather, perfectly wretched.
The queen-bee is showering. I am back in bed, alone for the first time since her yesterday's bathing. My head aches and when I look toward last night I see only black, blue, red in black, brown, white, gold. One’s hat pulled low, another’s chest puffed out.
Last night’s dream is equally present. I look toward it and see black, red, gold, black, white. La même chose, as they say here. My dream continued the night like a bark continues its progress after the cutting of the engine. Symbols changed form but not color, and so the ugly restlessness of the evening found no respite when I lay my head upon her chest to sleep.
Now, in memory, the dream preceeds its parent. She was driving my automobile back in a dream-England- an impossibility- so naturally we were waived to the side of the road by some enforcer of the law. Quickly, in the gold-lit, black-framed cabin, we switched seats so that I would take the blame and she keep her foreign papers unblemished.
Thus all blame was placed on me, and fragile love fell away as it could not keep me from the jailer. The rest of the dream, its body, was my 25th hour, my rebuke of the world in the moment of bidding it goodbye, a hot-faced pulling-shut of a door before it could be slammed in my face.
And of course the sensation of a slamming is the left-over of the evening spent prior to the dream. “We’re on vacation!” So she wanted to go to a cafe. “We’re in a café” so we ought to drink champagne. In time we were joined by others- filthy French, gaudy Italians- and I had endure the ordeal of her transformation, via champagne and mania, into a public being. After several glasses she was a marionette on strings tied to every point in the room. She tittered this way and that, a grotesque narration. Worst of all, whenever I caught her eye with my parched, longing, dead-weight gaze she looked away instantaneously, registering only the desperate need to turn from me. What depths this sent my mind into, I have learned to spare even myself the recounting.
And if this were not sufficient to fold my brain inward, I witnessed, as a sort of cabaret accompaniment to this act, the gypsy trumpet player send her into an hysterics that built and redoubled in time with his rising musical onslaught in a manner so sexual that I almost dumped her off my lap, feeling her convulsing there so similarly to sex-times. Making love to music. Touched by nothing but the air. My god.
This morning we drank red orange juice in wine glasses on the veranda. Dawn was more gold than apple green. I asked her to explain her darting eyes. She said, "Darling, I wasn’t looking at anything. I simply couldn’t." And that laugh? "Why, it was my own hysterics that drove me further, I wasn’t listening to a note that man was playing." I folded my napkin. I looked away, at whatever found itself beyond the railing. I knew she was looking at me to see if I believed her. I did. And so I felt better, or rather, perfectly wretched.
posted by M.N.V.L. Local 1430 at 2:59 PM
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