Sketchbook 1995

Weird, the story that fragments can tell.

1995

“The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God if you want to – be God’s actress, if you want to … You can at least try to, if you want to – there’s nothing wrong in trying. You’d better get busy though, buddy. The goddamn sands run out on you every time you turn around.”
— Franny and Zooey

I lie here in the Sri Lanka darkness,
+ I find myself yearning …

— No matter what I say to you,
I’m telling you I love you —

“There isn’t a word evolved enough for what we are.” — M. 1/11/95 Dawn

Fear and regret are twin thieves who rob us of today.

“Both of us loved her, and neither of us liked me very much.”
— Cliff Eberhardt, 2/9/95

Life is beautiful.

– Lily Taylor, “Arizona Dream”

Dream: 2/11/95
I was working in a diner. It was P’s diner. He was the cook. He wore an apron. It was my first day. I was so nervous. I was shaking. There were 10 booths. I was leaning over to check for the table’s #s. P. was in the kitchen, getting the stove ready. He wasn’t really paying any attention to me. He wasn’t being mean, but he wasn’t pampering me. I was on my own. I went to the first table. It was Siobhan and a friend. But she wasn’t acting like Siobhan at all. And she ordered a candy bar (a very specific candy bar that I can’t remember right now.) And one other thing. I looked at my check pad and could barely write the order. I went into the basement to look for the candy bar. There was a long line of boxes labelled w/ dif. candy bars. I searched and searched, getting more and more panicked. I really was panicking. Talking to myself, near tears. “Where are they? Where are they?” Having a breakdown. I kept waiting for “someone” to come rescue me. I knew I had stayed down in the basement too long (hm. Wonder what that’s about) and I was afraid to go back – afraid of what I’d find.

I came back up and the whole place was full, already eating. P. had clearly taken all the orders and brought their food while I was weeping in the basement. (Hm.)

I was afraid P. was angry with me. I looked into the kitchen (the kitchen wasn’t a separate room, it was at the end of the diner) – P. was 3/4s turned away from me, I saw him wiping the stove clean of grease. He didn’t seem angry. He was just doing his job.

River river carry me home
River river carry me home to the place where I come from
So deep
So wide
You take me on your back for a ride
If I should fall would you swallow me deep inside?
River – show me how to float
I feel like I’m sinking down
Thought that I could get along
But here in this water my feet won’t touch the ground
I need something to turn myself around
Flowing away
Away toward the sea
River deep
Can you lift up and carry me
Roll on thru the heartland
Til the sun has left the sky
River river, carry me high
Til the washing of the water makes it all right
Let your waters reach me
Like she reached me tonight
Letting go is so hard
The way it’s hurting now
To get this love untied
So tough to stay with this thing
Cause if I follow through, I face what I denied
I get those hooks out of me
And I take out the hooks that I sunk deep in your side
Kill that fear of emptiness, loneliness I hide
River, oh river, river running deep
Bring me something that will let me get to sleep
In the washing of the water will you take it all away
Bring me something to take this pain away
— Peter Gabriel

There’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to from our adolescent war
And I start to feel a fever from the warm air thru the screen
You come regular like seasons shadowing my dreams
The Mississippi’s might and it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across with 5 steps down
And I guess that’s how you started –
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown
And there’s not enough room in this world for my pain
Signals cross and love gets lost
And time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits I need you the most
I’m in love with your ghost
— Indigo Girls

Dream: 3/4/95
Only image I clearly remember: an older black couple lying in bed. The dream camera was diagonally up on the ceiling – not directly over them. The room was dim, had an underground Hobbit-like feeling. Patchwork quilt on bed. The situation as I understand it: Everyone (I was included in this, all my friends) was meeting for breakfast. A kind of potluck breakfast. And this black coule was coming too and it was expected that they would come because they made great waffles. This couple knew we would all be disappointed if they didn’t come. However (this is a huge setup for this tiny remembered image) – their baby had just died. So all I remember is the dim image of the 2 of them in bed, lying on their beds, holding each other, tears rolling down their cheeks, yet saying to each other, “We have to go to breakfast. They expect us. We can’t not go.”

3/3/95 3 am
“Are you crying? That ain’t right. You should never cry when you’re with me. You crying has nothing to do with You and Me.” — M.

Before everything fell apart, he became one of the few who mattered to me in the world.
— Goldbug Variations

The Care and Feeding of Foreigners
spectral trees glazed with lapidary
trills and mordants of winter
growing more variegated
four-ale
tetragrammaton
semaphores
phloem-pipes, palisades
Franciscan of 4th Street
capacitance
emaciated as a Cranach Christ
Disraeli – never complain, never explain
worse than aphasic w/ quotes
metastasized cells
steady call to tonic
Limerick Ladies from Lunt
St. Francis prayer
Dr. Arendt
attacca
multifoliate counterpoint
reagent

“He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.”
— Goldbug Variations

“Are you waiting for someone?” — P. to me, ’92

The Cluny tapestries – ? research

Good Thing by Patty Larkin
Looking at the face of forever
Well I’ve heard enough
And I’ve seen enough
And I know enough to know
I know a Good Thing when I see it
And it’s a bad thing to let go
Well I’ve been around
I’ve been up and down
Until I bent out of control
With your world all in motion
Got to put a ball and a chain on your soul
All those angels running
Picking up the pieces
Putting back together hearts broke long ago
I know a good thing when I see it
And it’s a bad thing to let go
There will always be lovers with borders of their own
And you may charge across in a golden chariot
But you will never be home
I had dreams like distant thunder
I had hope like a prayer unheard
Now this is nothing less than perfect
In a less than perfect world
All those angels running
Picking up the pieces
Putting back together hearts broke long ago
I know a Good Thing when I see it
And it’s a bad thing to let go

3/13/95 Dream:
My wallet – cheap white leather – was stolen. I was SO UPSET because my license was gone. I was having a FIT. Screaming. My voice all hoarse. “Don’t you GET it? My ID! My ID!” I was in a long weird dim room, long ceiling, fucked-up perspective, like Willy Wonka. P. was back in a corner and I believe he was on roller skates. And I just wanted him to deal with my crisis of lost identification. We sat on steps, he one step below me – and I was SO UPSET – and he was glancing behind his shoulder, at me but not at me. Very blase, indifferent.

“I lay as I had fallen, merely turning apprehensive eyes slowly left, toward the wall, to look fully into the wicked gaze of my creature. It no longer frightened me. Indeed, I felt as if I were seeing the cause of my anxiety itself for the first time, exactly as it was.”
— Alice Walker, “Possessing the Secret of Joy”

“There was a boulder lodged in my throat. My heart surged pitifully. I knew what the boulder was; that it was a word; and that behind that word I would find my earliest emotions. Emotions that had frightened me insane.” — Alice Walker, “Possessing Secret of Joy”

The Troubled Face of Quiet

If I can run fast enough, I could fly —

“I am really asking whether woman cannot begin, at last, to think thru the body, to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized – its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings.”
— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

Dream: 4/12/95
Dreamt of P. We were in this country academic town – like Ithaca – green lawns I remember – a big grey church – that academic feel of autumn and bells ringing. I was on a quest to get P. some water. He needed water and I was searching everywhere. I think I only found him a glass. There was a lot more to the dream. He was leaving. My parents were somehow there. I said, “I’ll walk you to the van.” He said, “Okay.” He seemed very sad – weak – I wanted to take care of him. He was trying to explain to me why he couldn’t be with me. That there was something more to the story. Then he whispered to me – so so quiet – he basically just moved his lips, exaggeratedly forming the words, “I have a virus.” And – it wasn’t a flu – he definitely had a disease – he was dying.

Dream: 4/13
Lying in a messy bed with M. I said something that made him laugh so hard – he was burying his face in the blankets, screaming with laughter.
— When I woke, I remembered the dream + it made me feel very weird. And wistful. Because in the 3 years I’ve known M. I’ve never made him laugh like that. I’ve actually never seen him laugh like that with anyone.

June 16
Horrible and scary dream this a.m. I had to wake myself up from it. I was looking on as this Arabian man tortured a cat. It escalated and escalated until he stuck a pen in the cat’s eyeball. I felt like it was happening to me. I was screaming as loud as I could. “No! No!” I heard the cat start to scream too. And the Arabian fuck was getting satisfaction out of it. He took a grim pleasure in the torture. “Roger told me to keep the cats off the lawn.” It was in the middle of the eyeball gouging that I pulled myself up out of sleep, screaming. I scared M. He’s used to my nightmares now.

June 18 Last night: FAULKNER

WAITING
Recognition
Connection
Expanding
Surrender
Crossroads
Dissolve
Core
Plea
Roots
Yearning
Defeat
Shadowland
Letting Go
Letting Go
Letting Go
LEGACY

Make Voyages.
Attempt them.
That’s all there is.

— Tennessee Williams, “Camino Real”

Dream July 4th 1995
Pieces I remember:
Browsing in a bookstore. Saw a rack of blank books and started browsing. Black cover with white pages, oversized. Then I saw a thick book covered with an odd kind of crushed velvet that looked like leopard skin. But there was a greenish tint to it. I picked it up, drawn to it. It was falling apart in an endearing way, and on the binding was a sticker saying “Free”. I opened it and I realized that it was already full of writing. It was someone’s journal. There was a lot of different colored pens used, some crayon too – red, blue, pink. It took me a second to realize that it was my own handwriting. Someone had covered up my recognizable journal with the leopard skin. In the dream, I hadn’t even realized that I had lost a journal. I saw the date: ‘July 7’. And I thought – ‘Oh, this is last summer’s journal.’ (The P. summer.) And immediately, I was back there, in that summer. Image – with a moving camera – a crowd outside – summertime – clearly waiting for P. Then I read the words in the journal: “He said Hello with such gentleness and love and excitement.” (That really is how I feel about P. and how he would talk to me. Even Hellos were deeply layered experiences.)

Then there was a whole section about M. I can’t tell this part literally – I don’t remember images or anything – but I learned something about M. I learned that he had been married long before – or maybe just seriously involved with someone – and they had had a baby girl – and for some mysterious reason the baby girl died. And M. felt responsible, guilty, ashamed, and everyone kind of did blame him for the death. But he never ever ever spoke of it.

July 13 a.m.
Dream: I was at Mum and Dad’s and I was going downstairs to meet T and his new wife. The dream was like reality. I hadn’t seen him in years. I had never met her. I could hear the voices downstairs. Mum and Dad talking with them in the hallway. I descended. T had the weirdest most unattractive haircut I had ever seen. It was kind of like a shag, but the top of it was curly, guido-ish – it looked perfectly horrible. His back was to me. He turned. We hugged. I said, “Your hair!” and touched the back of his head. Our hug ended abruptly and awkwardly. Very unsatisfying. Turned to the wife. She seemed to be standing on a step above me.

July Dream:
After my show. But it wasn’t at Shattered Globe. It was like a high school, or Shiel Park. People, audience members, were milling about. Laverne was there, sitting, waiting for me. I thought P. had been there so I was searching for him. Looking everywhere. I saw many people that I knew from all parts of my life, but no P. I was very hurt and disappointed. Then – and this section was separated from the rest of my dream –

I was listening to P. on the phone. He was in an office, the door was open, I could see him. I eavesdropped. He was calling his girlfriend for some reason, and he called her “Bijou”. It was his pet name. “Well, my little Bijou …”

July 25
God what was my dream
what was it —
P. —

August 18 1995
Dreamt: I was in the moivie Waterworld. Very elaborate dream. In helicopters flying over endless ocean with this big island with a weird scooped-out end. “You know what that is, don’t you?” “A volcano?” Little dirty people – a lot of high-up shots – Then I was down on a boat or a raft with a girl who was my Waterworld guide, as though this world were real and I was new to this world. She was telling me everything, showing me how everything worked. The sea was full of activity – boats and sea monsters. There was an enormous fish going by, half in the water, half out – like a submarine – and it was as long as an ocean liner. Far away, there were frolicking little Lochness monsters. I looked down into the water. Not too far down, I saw what looked like the bottom – only it had big black and white designs – too close to the surface to be the bottom. It was a huge animal of some kind. Then someone pointed way out to sea – and I saw the tidal wave. Somehow, there were 2 mountain/volcanoes sticking up out of the ocean, and the wave was being funneled through that channel. I was terrified. It was like I was there – but also like I was a scared spectator (“There’s a tidal wave in this movie?”). It was HUGE. White – roaring. The 2 of us crouched down and hid our heads to wait it out. Then – and this will be very hard to explain – it was just after the tidal wave went over us. And – then it was gone – but it had this suction effect, like a whirlpool – only on a massive scale – and suddenly my entire field of vision was taken up by brown and then – it pulled back – and back – and it was a HUGE ocean liner – right over us – and the ocean liner was being sucked backward by the tidal wave at a very fast rate. It was terrifying. Abd then it was gone too. I was glad I wasn’t on that boat.

Then I was zooming around in a motorized hangglider – I remember one other girl – in a pink bikini and sunglasses – and then the Waterworld section ended and I was moving into a new house. It was a huge house and people were moving into rooms all over it. I was on this glassed-in porch. I remembered walking by the house years earlier and taking a picture of it it was so pretty. Fountain in front yard, flowers, grass – and now I lived there. Then I heard Mitchell’s voice – his actual voice – I mean, it woke me up – and I heard him say, “Hey, Sheila, your old friend M. came by and sang us a song.” I woke up like a shot, saying, “What? What? M? M’s here?” I put on my T-shirt and went out of my room, totally expecting Mitchell to be standing right there. After all, I heard him. But he wasn’t there. That was all a part of the dream.

1996
“She’s a trophy wife, she used to be a wild child, and she loves museums.” – Wade on some girl

“Did I come at a bad time or are you rehearsing Strindberg?” – Melissa, 30something

9/21/97
Michael proposed last night.

Everything in the universe is subject to change, and everything is right on schedule.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
— Jack London

12/5/97
P.’s wife B. came to me in a dream. It felt like a visitation. P. was in the dream, but only subliminally. I was in their apartment. I had let myself in (I was told to) and I felt sort of awkward and anxietal. Just standing around, waiting. Would he introduce me to her? Would she even be there?

Then she walked into the kitchen. She had long dark hair, she was very angular. She looked vaguely anorexic – prominent teeth – not very good skin – yet not unattractive. She was holding a bag of groceries. She put them down on the counter. She sort of smiled at me, not really.

I awkwardly made the first move, held out my hand. ‘I’m Sheila.”

Everything changed then. She looked at me again – and then came over to me and put her arms around me. She said to me as she hugged me, “I know you think the world of my husband.”

_______
Kate made this observation: “An anorexic holding a bag of groceries? What’s that about?”

David: “She’s got the abundance that you want, but she’s not being nourished.”

12/15/97
Emerging from – where? Subway station – I came out into a place like Washington Square Park – bright sunny day – lots of people (dream extras) – and then there were these turnstiles placed randomly – not connected to anything apparently. And we had to go thru them. Michael was waiting by one of them for me. He had sunglasses on – a huge smile. Something was weird about it, though. Something wasn’t quite right. The ground was covered in something. Confetti? Leaves? Scuffing thru them.

Is this a marriage metaphor?

1/17/98
Very cool dream with Michael – we were hanging out – I needed him to do something for me. He was sitting on a chair – I was on a chair beside him – only sitting up on the back of the chair, so I was higher. He wasn’t looking at me.

I said, “Could you–”

He said immediately, “Come on.” Or soemthing like that. “Let’s go.” “Of course.” “Absolutely.” Immediate unconditional agreement and I burst into laughter.

Then there was a whole underwater drama which I cannot remember.

1/19/98
Okay. Lots. Dream:
I was in a bar with Rich, it was sort of well lit – and it was like we were in a movie. Somehow it was artificial. And I said, “And there’s M.!” Introducing him as a character. He was sitting down at the end of the bar (of course) and he had this white thing wrapped around his head – a cross between a bandage and Arab headgear. He looked insane. W/ this placid look on his face. Rich did a sort of violent karate move to get M.’s attention. M., alert, looked @ Rich – ready for anything – + the look on his face in that moment – I was so struck by it. The un-real blueness of his eyes, the very alive expression. Then M. said, referring to what was clearly an imaginary entity beside him: “I’d like you to meet my sidekick … Dobat.” Yes. Do-baht. Dobat? Robot? What?

Nov. 14 Dream:
Going down to the beach? – to watch the end of the world. I was w/ Brendan, Maria, and we had Cashel’s stoller but Cashel wasn’t in it. And at first we were driving – we didn’t know what we were driving to see – we didn’t know what was going to happen – was it going to be a natural disaster? A meteor? An asteroid? And as we drove (and the road was filled with cars) – in the distance we kept seeing this sort of highly mechanized huge slingshot-type apparatus – it was as big as a crane. We could see it from far away, and randomly – it would sort of unbuckle – and release something up into the air – a missile? It seemed like a futile attempt to stave off the disaster. Primitive. But – it was giving it its best shot. I remember Maria’s calm energy. I was so happy I was with her. Eventually, the road got so clogged with cars that we got out and walked. Everybody else was doing that, too. I said something like, “Do we really want to be getting close to this disaster? Front row seats?”

And Maria said something – in a phrasing I can’t remember – something like, “This will be a morning in history.”

And we still didn’t know if the end of the world was a sure thing, so maria was saying: if it’s a mistake, then we’ll go home – but let’s not hide from it. Let’s greet it with open eyes.

Nov. 22 98
My dream world is really coming back. In this past week alone:

1. M. got an office job – he wore a blue suit. It upset me SO MUCH. I went to visit him and we were looking for a private place to make out. No luck. M.’s feet were suddenly the size of a child’s. I wanted to cry, seeing those small feet – it was like M. had been totally diminished. Tragedy.

2. Slow deliberate movement of a monstrous “s” – I was so scared in the dream that my brain would not accept what I was seeing

3. Claude Monet was being fucked up the ass by this claymation pygmy fertility-doll type man with a penis the size of a tree trunk.