December 3, 2014

December 3, 2014

There’s a storm starting up outside my window, and there has been a storm brewing in my heart for a while now.  I feel that everything I have carried out in the past, will now come home to either haunt me right up till my death, or fly like a buzzard over my body, just waiting till I stop breathing.   I woke up from a dream just now, where I was wandering in a foreign city, and I’m not sure if it was Paris or Tokyo, but it’s a location that I visit often in my dreams.  Bookstores are very much part of my dream world.  I have at least three bookshops that I visit in my dreams.  I’m sure that they are based on actual stores, but to this day, I can’t figure out which store or in what location.  The bookstore last night was a second-hand store that always sold interesting titles, and mostly was Penguin editions from the 1940s. The store was located on a side-street off the big arcade.   I remember there were Americans on the street, but obviously tourists of some sort and manner.  I couldn’t find the store, and when I woke up, I felt a great depression upon me.  I think through my dreams, I’m trying to find heaven, but alas, it is so close to me, I can almost feel it - but then I awake, and I’m left with a storm outside, that clearly represents how I feel inside my heart and soul.

I’m not a great traveler, but I do travel time-to-time, and it’s always for the pleasure of looking for pleasure in some area of the world that will spark my imagination.  I often dream of going to the cinema and it is always a theater located in a very urban part of the city - meaning not in the suburbs.   I know it’s a film by Jean-Luc Godard, with a soundtrack by Nino Rota, but as far as I know the soundtrack or the Godard film does not exist in the awakening life.   But my dream of the film is in great detail, and it is an actual movie, including credits, stars, and so forth.  And even though the soundtrack was by Rota, I clearly made-up the music and orchestration in my dream.  Which is unbelievable to me, because I’m totally tone-deaf and couldn’t carry a melody if your life depended on it.  Nevertheless I have the entire orchestration as well as the narrative of this film in great detail in my dreaming life.

“Tell me, can one at all denote thinking and feeling as things entirely separable?  I cannot imagine a sublime intellect without the ardor of emotion.” In my awakened life, I try to separate my feelings from that actions that I do on a daily basis.  A sense of detachment is important for a writer, so in theory that artist can see his work placed in a bigger context.   Yet, in my dreams, I’m consistently emotional, and when I do see a film in that state or landscape, it fits perfectly with how I’m feeling at that moment.  When I’m conscious and writing in a library or in my studio, I feel totally not connected to the written page that is in front of me.  “My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof.” Yet, I lose the focus once my morning starts up and I have to face the afternoon, and then the dread of the evening.  Only in dreams do I seem to exist in my fullest capacity as a writer and human being.

“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.” Therefore I feel dead, yet only alive in my deepest dream.  On the other hand “knowing this to be a worthless life to live, why do I keep living on?  Because life contains something called beauty.” And for me, the beauty in my life, is in a dream.