System made Beholdthrelish=unavaliable ie: dentistry
Letter 49
Behavioral Modification
March 18, 2013
Dear Merwin,
I fought the inclination to text him while I was sleeping.
I had the weirdest dream but of course I remembered the dream so that in and of itself is memorable. He was there- I suppose he always is.
I had woken to electrical zings somewhere between 3 and 5 am; as I stretched to try and get some more sleep the thought “piano strings about to break” from my finger tips all the way to my shoulder and up my neck. Now there’s that, all the usual symptoms and that old awful metallic taste that could have me making full time work out of not hurling all day today as such days usually run into tomorrow.
That and having to make my eyes form that triangle shape, that point- that’s part of the why I haven’t been able to see right for over ten years: the focus hasn’t changed but the sockets aren’t entirely working together. Which means I could work at forcing them all day and be super dizzy or let the circuit rest and have a voluntary blindness day as much as possible- with the exception of this because I so rarely remember my dreams.
I don’t know what I was dreaming before I woke up and managed a little of what was technical sleep but certainly not rest and even in there I encountered cell phones and cigarettes.
Where it started, or where I first remember it starting was and is in a room he was in? Or a place I knew he was. I’ve written the next sentence twice already and this being my third pass I’ll merely say: no words were exchanged, I don’t believe he saw me and I promptly left as soon as I knew he was there. I went across the street instead to a building once a church and now The Rock-n-Roll café with a large banner loudly announcing “We’re Open”. Knowing they might only be open for a short time as such signs have the invisible subtext: “please, please, please come in lest we have to close“. I went in: a mercy customer.
I admired it though, the building. The old redbrick, ancient hydrangeas in mottled blue and pink bloom which were oddly straggly and not at all like their usual rounded bush but like long languid singular branches only in, and with, blooms and leaves at their ends. The branches had been allowed to grow in this strange form as if tendrils were emerging from the building. Considering the inner décor perhaps that was entirely the case.
There was a huge turquoise canvas, a piece just behind the head of the proprietor amid a shop, I presume it was a shop?
The place featured enough art to be an art gallery except there was too much for that and it had turned into an above ground attic with lots of old junk with the exception of that large canvas layered in various blues with dollops of smudged white. (probably because of that NPR singer I heard on that program yesterday wherein she sang in “B minor- a very unusual key for that song” and kept referring to the host as John so of course I turned off the broadcast just the same as I left the building/place he was in during the dream but still in this dream I’ll consider texting him. It will actually occur to me.)
Inside the church’s ( in edit I have sudden urge to hear “Under the Milky Way” filed in summer 1989)
I am in The Church’s rock and roll café which is too many parts layers and layers of stuff lining the walls and without a menu?
I turn my head to look at something and when my gaze returns to the proprietor she has a malicious glint in her eye. I feel temporarily dazed because the painting is gone, the one in progress the one in layers of blues and turquoise, the one painting that was interesting and instead it has been replaced by several paintings making the same large shape leaning against a wall. All her replacement paintings are of the same type you find in shopping malls or anywhere someone had bad taste.
The proprietor looks at me as though she’s waiting for a reaction: she knows she’s switched the background and seems to be waiting to see if I know, if she’ll get what I’m there to feed her because this café feeds on the customers. I don’t know if she got the doe in headlights confused expression she was waiting for so greedily.
She’s frightening and exudes a conniving mean spirit so I leave. I can’t say whether she got the reaction from me she seemed to be waiting for but maybe I have a poker face in my dreams.
Either before or after I existed the rock-n-roll church cafe I had a thought about the place I hadn’t walked into and what would certainly be a kindly proprietor. I had thought about volunteering that perhaps it would help if people could see inside. “If people could see the tables“ I had thought before I entered the building “a (plexi)glass door“ - then it occurred to me the historic society would probably have something to say about any alteration regarding the doors and I realized I was in Savannah.
I had been in this Savannah before. Of course its not really Savannah but a Savannah in dreams just like Charleston is never Charleston in my dreams and both places seem to be constructed of large doses of Beaufort. (S.C.)
Now I don’t remember if the rock-n-roll café was before the gas station or after the gas station but the restaurant certainly came at the end- right before I woke up.
After leaving the rock-n-roll café across the street from the guy who- well you’re here to replace him Merwin.
So I leave the café and it is a sunny gorgeous day and I am suddenly standing in front of a white stucco building at least four stories high. I am admiring, with a few other people, the grandness of this white façade as if we are on a Greek island with Spanish architecture.
Plumes of coral begonia fronds with leaves as big as elephant ears are glossily not only adorning the building’s sunny rooftop veranda. At the front and center of the stucco façade, at the heart of the building -a huge spray is seemingly growing, ever so slowly airily-fairily growing out of the building. Watching the plant sway against the building I’m cognizant and wonder if anyone else knows.
I think of what I often see here in non dream and sometimes living nightmare Charleston: people seem unaware that in the tropics plants can quickly turn a building into rubble.
In this dream, from what I can see at ground level one of the plants hanging from the huge colander sized containers, or perhaps from the large array lining the rail from enormous window boxes: Was a leaf lost or was it an errant seed cast which found a crack and began to root in the damp of the breathing stucco?
The glossy green, the splash of coral against the sun bleached white of the clean Spanish lines and I thought “he must know this building- I’ll send him a picture” and in between I think about the title, unable, as usual, to remember begonia and thinking instead “bougainvillea”. And then I remember.
I don’t remember “begonia” - I have to wake up for that to happen.
No, I remember I can’t write him because he doesn’t want me writing him.
“I could just send the picture,” a voice says.
But no. I put the idea of a camera shot away and instead am walking down a curved street and on my right I see I am walking toward a huge rock formation with sulfur yellow streaks against a grey that seems nearly to glow as the sun hits what must be high amounts of mica in its walls. A lovely crumbling shape which is not a rock but a building carved from rock? No, a building in disrepair and I notice the street I’m on. The white building has disappeared and I only see women lined up on their stoops showing shoulder, showing leg - the observing men approaching them transmit some kind of permanent sloth particle like an odor that’s permeated plastic.
There’s something dirty about the street and I can’t see around the bend of where the rock formation building is, the lighting is great but beginning to dull and I don’t know what’s around that corner only that this lose pack of men is heading in that very direction, there may be more of this pack ahead and wherever I’m going I don’t want to be where they are.
They’re like that guy at the gas station, and that woman in the rock and roll café, a sneer in waiting. The gas station where I’d gone down stairs, found that I lived there- or once had- because there was my old german shepherd Bishop and a cat I feel guilty about, a hole in the door and me feeling as if I didn’t and never could have done enough for either of them. There’s a hole in the door for Mongo who doesn’t look anything like Mongo but I know its her “good for hunting” I say guiltily because I took her away from hunting ground. I’m glad for the hole in the door because I always felt he would’ve forgotten and killed her that way - just like he killed that kitten.
I know Bishop made the hole in the door for Mongo because he would. I know I’ll be blamed for the escape-n- hunt hatch he made for her but that’s okay- I’d rather that. I don’t blame them I just wish it was a better, nicer place for them than the basement of this crummy gas station.
I think that’s where the dream started: in the gas station.
So the gas station, the church as rock-n-roll failing café, the white stucco house with coral colored fronds sprouting from its heart, a big rock formation crumbling like public housing, a seedy street where nothing good grows and across the street into the restaurant.
I’m in and out. Time loses its structural sequence so thoroughly I actually become aware of it: actions are completed before they’re started and it is as if I am in the Quantum Café; perhaps I am. I go outside and am not glad to find a circle of smokers because I don’t smoke anymore and was hoping for some air, for some feeling of space because this all feels like its closing in.
I go back in the restaurant and see the waitress’s section now has another single sitting at a table, one of her four tops -which sucks.
Was I at a two top? I don’t remember. I feel badly about not having any cash to leave the waitress. I secure my bags like a homeless person. Am I? Am I homeless?
I wake up in an apartment.
I have a stove.
I’ll make some tea.
So Merwin- having remembered the dream in crystal clarity I figured I’d write in down. I had my cup of plant, sat on some ice - my left ear just popped. Wonder if that will be all day?
Hmm- I was still so asleep when I started writing this I was in, dated it: 2012
