Thursday, January 17, 2013

GOING NUCLEAR


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I tend to remember bits of dreams.  This one must have had a beginning of some kind, but it's only the climactic end that I remember...

Ellie and I are at some major social event, at a rather splendid location--a restaurant? a ballroom?--with a magnificent view out over the Los Angeles basin.  It's not unlike the view from our own balcony, but, in the way of dreams, it's at once both striking familiar and utterly strange.  This vista, it seems to me, is flatter and broader than our own, where the Hollywood Hills are a prominent feature on the northern side...

There is a lull in the activity around us as we look out over the city and notice a huge cloud rising slowly in the distance.  It takes the eerie shape of a mushroom cloud but taller, more psilocybin than shitake (more phallic, then?) as distinct from the familiar image of the "mushroom cloud."

And yet... the word is soon spreading rapidly among the crowd: there has been a bomb.  It must be terrorists.  This is the moment we have all long feared.  We now see not only the cloud expanding skyward like a cumulous erection, but the radiation spreading downward in electric green-hued, ever widening, translucent and pulsating circles over the western part of the city.

Soon the streets below the balcony where we stand are filled, as though in a motion picture, with mobs rushing this way and that in fear, uncertainty and consternation.  After observing this scene of panic for a while, Ellie and I retire into a private space--a bedroom?--where we contemplate with remarkable calm the inevitability of the city's death, and our own.


2 comments:

CHI SPHERE said...

The vivid dream you recount is clearly pictorial. Your recent life spent engaging the thousands of paintings and works of art you've spent many "slow looking" hours contemplating must inform the strength of your inner visions.

I do have occasional dreams that are remarkable in their detail. Some are auditory and have smells I think I can perceive even after waking. The division between reality is blurred at these times and it often takes several minutes for my emotions to settle and the sensations to subside. The memory of these dreams stays with me and has informed some of my work like the flying meat axes hurtling though interstellar space I made after the Nam.

Some newer works are the byproduct of the financial meltdown in the form of mens suits with surveillance mikes and radio transmitters in them and telltale text written on them. The dreams are occasionally so beautiful that I attempt to stay in them as long as possible. When I was 8 a boy named Bob would visit me in my dreams and tempt me to cross over into the dream world. He became and imaginary friend. My mother allowed my fantasy to exist during that summer and would set a place at the table for him each evening. Bob never ate his food, he was never hungry, but I carried on a conversation with him as though her was there. Mom sure did worry and I went first to the family doctor and then to a therapist to share my imaginary friend with them. I could summon him up with ease. After about a dozen visits to the therapist Bob went home and never returned.

I share this with TBD readers for Peter wrote about Bob in the poem that brought us together 40 years ago and it still lives in our the book we made together, Bob Went Home, a very difficult and beautiful 3D multiple.

Peter Clothier said...

Thanks, Gary. This one is especially meaningful for me.