A Reprise

This evening I thought a great deal of the dreaming state, daydreaming or visualizing, and writing, and how closely connected they are. Writing is not nor ever will be for me a mechanical cranking-out of well-executed words, phrases or passages designed to optimally carry a concept. It is a dream-state where I live vividly. It seems like I could write continuously, living within that writing, for a lifetime. Likewise when I pick up a thread again I am returning to that place, and time has frozen since I left. Writing is for me supernatural. It is a way or returning to the past or jumping into the future, a dreamscape of my past or future, and most often my present. I can stop or manipulate time. I can return to a story I began ten years ago, opening a door upon myself closed ten years hence. When I reflect upon my past, my dreamscapes are every bit as much a part of it as what I experienced in fact. Without them and my writing to understand and express myself, I can't live.

I have just found an old journal where I recorded a few of my dreams six and four years ago. Here are some fragments. I lost my shoes in the mud, then they floated out into the water. I kept fearing that they would sink, but the other person reassured me they'd float. There were lots of lost shoes: sandals and flip flops, floating over the pond. I had to climb onto a raft to retrieve mine. His car was pulling a trailer, and it was going out of control. I was really mad at him. Both of us were in the trailer. No one was in the cab. I was running toward a clear plain in a canyon, and I realized the side jutted up really high, so I started running back toward the other side, because I was afraid this huge wall would fall down on me. The other side of the plain was rocky, muddy and difficult to run through. This was like the old land in New Waverly. A glass steepe with all of these pretty shoes, but all I wanted were shoes that would fit my feet. I said I usually got them at Wal-mart. ...

I completed Villette the day before last. I was intrigued and immersed, but I left off with a dissatisfied feeling. I concluded that mid-century novels are not to my taste right now. They are too much about a suffering creature, her tormentors, and her triumph through perfect virtue.  Spaniels were popular dogs at the time. There was one in Villette , actually, that was positioned like a female rival, and I know women's hairstyles popular during that time mimicked the spaniel's ears.  Caleb Williams , written by William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley, is more interesting to me, written in the voice of the early century, preoccupied with ideas like those of other early Romantic writings. The story is about a fame-seeker and popular curiosity. It relates interestingly to modern media.

Delphinia moved past them, her fingers clutching the handle of her cane with deep consternation. She felt herself adrift as before, the night in transit with Adelia, when she had sought the peace of nature and dreamed fervently, and wakened to find her friend abdicated. She threw herself near the river, on soft green grass amid snowy drifts of edelweiss. "There is no one," she whispered, behind her closed eyes reflecting on the self-serving expression of Oskar, the cold looks of Gauvain, Adelia's crafty smile, and Beatrice's condemnation. She turned in a fever with her face to the grass, inhaling soil, tasting dew. A fragrance rose in her nostrils: a soft crush of sound on the grass reached her. Through bleary eyes Delphinia saw a wavering shape blotting out the sun. She blinked away her fevered tears. The shape knelt. "Be still, my sister, my luckless other self. You are not alone." A fairy-like touch alighted on her shoulder. "I love him,...

As summer approaches I think more about projects. Right now I have none, except buying various things and organizing my photography collection. I have felt at a loss about my creative projects, because it seems like as soon as I call something a project, I don't do any more work on it. I haven't found more inspiration for The Summerhouse, my nonlinear fiction, and I have posted very reluctantly in Dark Virtue , my collection of darkly romantic images and text. I have been reading Artful Blogging nearly every day. Having any specific blog would not suit me. Perhaps this is why I don't post in Dark Virtue . There is another blog I have been writing more successfully, " A Fine and Private Place ." This takes the title of a book by Peter S. Beagle. It combines with my idea that a fine and private place is necessarily sober, even dark, like a cemetery. Emphasis on "private." The access is controlled on my more confiding concepts and photos.