550: Attempts at Surrealist Free Association Poems

Here they are, in no particular order. I'm not sure that I like them much, but there are some moments that work for me. I just don't know how such a conscious, physical act of writing, using language, can ever be fully free or unconscious. So, I know that some intention may have crept in here, but I found it difficult to "short-cut the mind."

Solitaire
ascending and descending cards
descending to the labyrinth
and Gollum’s cave through the
light of guitars the effusion
of mustiness and youth like an
elixir of gravy pouring from buckets
ever-present length of rope and
sand downing drowning

Bamboo
milky green and grapefruit
multi-hued multi-toned segments
of song brimming off the page leaving
nothing of substance except the
scent of brainwaves carrying the
message of turns through childhood
the elusive moral of sharing never
quite learned until mirrors morph
candles into clocks

Black and White
The animated soul of the pen
stumbles
creeping on all fours back to
the first love of page
and knight
castle and chorus join hands to
celebrate the marriage of money
and sense forever foraging
forests
of lines and squiggles for the one
which won’t escape
like a penguin in the Sahara

Search and Destroy
Blueberry skies and periwinkle oceans
blend into eggplant horizons
keeping the mind at bay while
the brain frolics through frosty
puzzles winning none leaving
some for the errant spider who
asks where we put the pie

Bubblegum
Pink Britney Spears Elephants again
Where did the asparagus go How
am I getting home Does the emperor
eat the ice cream Maybe his brain
is full of fluffy pink robots marching
to a mariachi tune I don’t know
where South America spills into
North America What comes from
purple pairings? Yellow submarines
dancing in a grassy field Snow
Harbor Why is the ghost in a sheep
costume and where are my cigarettes
Waterfalls trails tripping on stones
three blind mice coming at me
with a knife Awkward moments
of silence mashed potatoes and
cream

Glass Doctor
We fix your panes
My pains are the elegant delicate
old lady kind genteel in their torture
generously wracking
Muddy is messy and my heart
aches for pancakes but all will
be well when the lion roars
through my toes like the light
of a remote control

Dreams and Premonitions

So I know we aren't supposed to bring our dreams into the dayworld, but what about premonition dreams? How do we account for dreams that ARE related to the dayworld through no choice or actions of our own? Perhaps I should backtrack. Night before last I had a dream where, among other things, my car was stolen. For no particular reason, I was telling a friend about that dream this morning. A couple hours later, when I went to go to my car, a vandal had smashed one of the windows. While I realize that theft and vandalism are not the same thing, I don't normally think about, much less dream about, my car. Why would I have this time? My friend immediately connected my dream to the discovery of broken glass and called it a premonition. So, my question is, is it at all reasonable to connect these or is it mere coincidence or??? Is this at all related to Melanie's theory of deja vu? All I'm saying, is I'm a little unsettled.

One more point of confusion: why would a Hillmanian interpret/analyze/discuss dreams at all? If they tell us nothing about the dayworld, and if we cannot live wholly in the underworld, what is to be gained? Also, if dreams are not to be brought into the light of day, then haven't we already compromised their underworld status by conscious telling or writing of them in the dayworld? Just by telling our dreams we bring them into the dayworld where they do not belong and have no connection. How can our conscious minds then deal with dreams?

Jamie's post about lucid dreaming caught my attention. I am notorious for having dreams from which I can awake and even do something (turn off the alarm, answer the phone, let the cat out, etc) before falling asleep and falling right back into the dream where I left off, often on purpose. I want to finish the dream, although it never reaches an end. I want to go back to that world. As if the dreamworld were an actual place I could go to. Another what about: what about when you dream and in the dream you know you are dreaming?

Yeat's Second Coming

I am posting the text of this poem because it seems to be following me this semester. I find it interesting that the spiral and the labyrinth both revolve or turn around a center that is often thought of as the eye of the storm, the calm, still, unchanging, stable center surrounded by the chaotic and destructive motion all around it. Yet Yeats suggests that this is not strong enough to hold things together, and that "mere anarchy" will eventually reign. And I am not inclined to disagree with him. Achebe and Derrida both reference this in a spiral of connections. The second stanza holds a sphinx creature and an unborn beast, a la mythological labyrinths. Perhaps time itself is the labyrinth or spiral in which we are caught and which will eventually destroy us, to start its revolutions again. I'm probably simplifying this too much, but that is where my thoughts are at the moment. Connections between revolutions (turnings not necessarily wars, though I suppose that too) and revelations.

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Convolutions

More random notes on spirals and labyrinths. This topic is HUGE, and I'm getting sucked in.

The spiral is an abstraction from nature codified by the labyrinth.

Labyrinth/maze
- string, guide
- minotaur/ sphinx/ guardian
- hero
- creator/ genius figure
- sacrifice/ sparagmos
- sacrificial victims
- quest / goal / treasure
- ordered, knowable
- descent, downward, underworld, Hades
- man-made
- woods as labyrinthine: dark, mysterious
mazelike: pan as god of woods: pan as one
who leads victims out of the dayworld


Spiral/ Vortex
- chaotic yet patterned enough to be also ordered
- represented by snakes, snails, tornados, whirlpools, fingerprints, ear, intestines, ram’s horn
- association with mirrors, reflection, repetition, opening up of consciousness
- descent, downward
- constant motion, movement, nothing static
- natural
- unsuspecting victims
- is its own monster

Both
- underworld, Hades, downward motion, descent, below surface
- chaos and order
- violence; beast, minotaur, dragon, sphinx, leviathan?, whale?
- regeneration, rebirth, going under and coming out again, changed, transformation, eternal return?
- time, cycles, cyclical; space
- center: calm and safe?
- radiation
- mystery and that which is hidden
- wandering, loss
- webs of connections, spiders

Other manifestations:
- ouroboros: self-consuming serpent
- caduceus: staff of Hermes/Mercury (guide to underworld and messenger of eternal life) with wings and intertwined serpents; symbol of health, healing, medicine
- DNA: spiraling double helix
- symbol of infinity

Notes from Frye
Frye 77 “all arts possess both a temporal and a spatial aspect” - As do spirals and labyrinths.
Frye 99 “archetype: that is, a typical or recurring image. I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience . . . archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication”
- could this very connection be seen as spiral-like?
Frye 102 “Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables” learned associations; some are obvious but none are necessary or inherent. I keep finding that the spiral and labyrinth can simultaneously hold or suggest or imply many and contradictory meanings, images, connotations, importances.

In the case of King Minos of Crete, the labyrinth held something of which he was both deeply ashamed and deeply fearful. Something he could not destroy because it was of divine origin. Thus it forced him to act as a tyrant, exacting fourteen (two sets of seven) sacrificial victims from the Athenians every eight years. Ultimately, it cost him his daughter.

Wild Sheep Chase

So, of course, everything I read lately seems to be obsessed with dreams. Permit me to quote somewhat extensively a dream sequence from Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. As I said earlier, I am interested in the dreams of fictional creations. How should we read these dreams? I'm also interested in this discussion of dreams for its own merit. If you want to skip past the minutiae of the dream to the discussion of dreams and symbols, please feel free to only read the bolded parts.

I dreamed about a dairy cow. Rather nice and small this cow, the type that looked like she'd been through a lot. We passed each other on a big bridge. It was a pleasant spring afternoon. The cow was carrying an old electric fan in one hoof, and she asked whether I wouldn't buy it from her cheap.

"I don't have much money," I said. Really, I didn't.

"Well then," said the cow, "I might trade it to you for a pair of pliers."

Not a bad deal. So the cow and I went home together, and I turned the house upside down looking for the pliers. But they were nowhere to be found.

"Odd," I said, "they were here just yesterday."

I had just brought a chair over so I could get up and look on top of the cabinet when the chauffeur tapped me on the shoulder. "We're here," he said succinctly.

The car door opened and the waning light lof a summer afteroon fell across my face. Thousands of cicadas were singing at a high pitch like the winding of a clockspring. There was the rich smell of earth.

I got out of the limo, stretched, and took a deep breath. I prayed that there wasn't some kind of symbolism to the dream.


There are symbolic dreams - dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities - realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometime. It has nothing to do with me.

Yet the fact that the cow chose me to obtain her pliers changes everything. This plunges me into a whole universe of alternative considerations. And in this universe of alternative considerations, the major problem is that everything becomes protracted and complex. I ask the cow, "Why do you want pliers?" And the cow answers, "I'm really hungry." So I ask, "Why do you need pliers if you're hungry?" The cow answers, "To attach them to branches of the peach tree." I ask, "Why a peach tree?" To which the cow replies, "Well, that's why I traded away my fan, isn't it?" And so on and so forth. The thing is never resolved, I begin to resent the cow, and the cow begins to resent me. That's a worm's eye view of its universe. The only way to get out of that worm universe is to dream another symbolic dream.

The place where that enormous four-wheeled vehicle transported me this September afternoon was surely the epicenter of the worm universe. In other words, my prayer had been denied.