The Librarian Dreams
By William Dennis
Thoughts from Borges’, “Seven Nights: Nightmares”
Ist mein Leben geträumt, oder ist es wahr?
– Walter von den Vogelweide
– Walter von den Vogelweide
I
“No man can call himself whole...and sane, who dreams.”
“No man can call himself whole...and sane, who dreams.”
Waking After DreamKnow, no bed contains a sane man, no matter how he lies;
The force of dream disrupts our thought and lingers in the eyes. The Librarian’s dried-out eyes in bed,
blind minnows sunken in their caves, had left behind the waking blue and yellow wefts to dart in their illuminated head: Waking after dream, the Dictator, who woke a day of ire upon his slender race, awoke, a better dressed conquistador, mouth pursed about a dream’s chinchona taste. Such embarrassment, amid the chiding with a tongue of cat, fools and sinners, these lapses they call dream, that logic’s coaxing would make sane by two impossibles: to strike at one’s own coils or cease to dream. It drives an icy wedge down in between that for which one stands, and what he seems, where by right and ought no place had been. A Leader rather would be caught at lies than staring out a window at blue skies. |
II
“...Sir Thomas Brown believed that our memory of dreams
is more impoverished than the splendor of reality.”
“...Sir Thomas Brown believed that our memory of dreams
is more impoverished than the splendor of reality.”
From the Penguined WaveThe finest mesh our memory makes can never catch it all;
We wonder at the part too big and what may be too small.. Where cave-dark yields to blind-man’s blue and yellow,
the Librarian gropes to understand with what cupped palm he shoals up in the spray between the penguined wave and banked-down pillow, where the almost-waking swimmer stands and the oceanic drains away. The bit retrieved suggests that from the billow the smallest part gets brought to land. |
III
“Others, in turn, believe that we improve our dreams.”
“Others, in turn, believe that we improve our dreams.”
Night-JournalsFrom the seam a sculptor picks a single lump of coal,
From which he shapes a cat, so from dream’s black we shape recall. Or whether dream is pressed on skimmed design
from some particulate churn that never renders butter minus an improving hand– physicians grant this to the dextrous mind: that it may culture raw milk it engenders, which serves as host and stands as multiplicand. Crude surds and sonants, waking are refined as dream’s night-journals in a fairer hand. |
IV
“...as we are accustomed to a sequential life, we give a narrative structure
to our dream, though our dream has been multiple and simultaneous.”
“...as we are accustomed to a sequential life, we give a narrative structure
to our dream, though our dream has been multiple and simultaneous.”
As She Was
As custom has one sun and moon complete a single day,
We may un-bundle stuff of dreams for ease of use that way. Your early excavations re-collect
the necklace– some few things hard-won from many and given meaning order, not just any, as bits of dream on lines of time reflect a habit known in heaven as mankind’s. In so-called “now” your brimful eye is blessed– multiple and simultaneous– with history, lacking which they’d call you blind. The crone bends over the infant, as she was, a fountain wave of face and cresting figure; the meager girl peers from beauty’s burden in raw dream, waking changed as does the scarf drawn through a keyhole’s aperture, though once a gauze, become a cord just then. |
V
“We are in God’s memory.
We are God’s memory, who sees time whole as we see memory.”
“We are in God’s memory.
We are God’s memory, who sees time whole as we see memory.”
God’s MemoryMade in the Image, less than angels, and for rougher use,
We recollect for God in action ages-long of dreamed abuse. Before he opens eyes on morning’s race,
the dreaming reader opens up his vision to grasp the hem of God, and found a place for man as help the Paraclete still needs as memory’s body, enacting recollection; he might have half-remembered where it reads-- This stony land of sweet wells is love of the Beloved; But for beauty’s need to see, we could not have eyes. |
VI
“God sees all of history, what unfolds as history,
in a single splendid dizzying instant that is eternity.”
“God sees all of history, what unfolds as history,
in a single splendid dizzying instant that is eternity.”
Single Splendid DizzyingWho will remember me when I am gathered into dust,
Lord, if not you; and what am I, but recollected lust? The Librarian, in dream-state, sees all the past at once:
The nail before its forging for the cross in scattered rust. He sees a flower, folded and unfolded on itself, Memory serving, as to God, spacious mystery must. A splendor blurs the vision, making nether ends seem dark; The instant that is all of time, we leave in God’s blind trust. The scallop’s simple eyes, though blue, see only dark and light; Who sees you, Lord, may think you fair before he thinks you just. |
VII
“For the savage and for the child, dreams are episode of the waking life;
for poets and mystics,
it is not impossible for all of the waking life to be a dream."
“For the savage and for the child, dreams are episode of the waking life;
for poets and mystics,
it is not impossible for all of the waking life to be a dream."
Waking DreamIn childhood and poetry the eyes go blind with vision;
Savages and mystics never know their dream’s remission. No more laced, the dark wood’s twigs, than we
our fingers, grazing gaze and wooly hopes along life’s road, each thinking us to be the shepherd to our pilgrim, wandering folk. I dreamed you walked unguarded in your dreams and, child-eyed beside you, as your help, to guide your foot between what is and seems, I hurried, dreaming I might bear you up. Savage mystics and those children, poets, wake and sleep from dream to dream until they walk with unmade men on streets unmade an instant or this thousand-years-since still. Could I be thus vain and yet not know it: Is dream for both of us our native shade? |
VIII
"Ist mein Leben geträumt, oder is es wahr?”
– Walter von der Vogelweide
"Ist mein Leben geträumt, oder is es wahr?”
– Walter von der Vogelweide
TroubadourToo terrible, too wonderful, by turns--life seems unreal;
As if with too much seeing, blind, we judge life by it’s feel. What else on the heart but love’s restraining hand
tells us whether life is dream or truth? To choose beauty over what’s uncouth they say is easy work for untrained hands, though only dreaming do we never wonder. But the heart– the heart always decides, while the head– the head, engaging figments, sides against itself in closely reasoned blunder. In rhetoric they speak of many things– of false alternatives, such as Procrustes offered guests for choice, or whether life be dream or true, or troubadour that sings beneath the breastbone, like young hearts, like these, whose blood is red and bursting and mocks strife. |
IX
“A lullaby is a melody which comes quickly to rest, where the obstacles are easily overcome--and this is precisely the parallel to those waking dreams of struggle and conquest which we permit ourselves when falling asleep.... Folk tales are just such waking dreams. Thus it is right that art should be called a “waking dream."
(from Psychology and Form, Kenneth Burke, in Twentieth Century Criticism, Wm. J. Handy and Max Westbrook, eds, Macmillan, NY, 1974.)
“A lullaby is a melody which comes quickly to rest, where the obstacles are easily overcome--and this is precisely the parallel to those waking dreams of struggle and conquest which we permit ourselves when falling asleep.... Folk tales are just such waking dreams. Thus it is right that art should be called a “waking dream."
(from Psychology and Form, Kenneth Burke, in Twentieth Century Criticism, Wm. J. Handy and Max Westbrook, eds, Macmillan, NY, 1974.)
LullabyLap-tales come to artful rest--we struggle into sleeping;
Waking-dream and dream-awake take sleep in their close keeping. A thousand witches shriek and come undone;
no troll, in turn, is left un-stoned--we laugh; and down the stream the boat will lightly row, the bough be broke and caught a hundred times before the arms that hold you, sleeping, weaken or any tune grow stale because familiar With us, the silly little pigs all laugh; their wolf drops in ten visits in a row. The bridge roofed homeless trolls in those far times and heroes lacked such doubt as makes arms weaken. What troubles princes grows a speck familiar, but...from now to sleep, nothing goes undone. For sleep’s soft sake, let’s start a gentle row, such as before we’ve settled many times; with victory’s release, day’s grasp must weaken, all the sooner that the tale’s familiar. Much the better, day’s knot comes undone by song or tale that not quite makes us laugh. Animal-tales and parsley-songs sometimes take hold which does not slip, although it weaken. In wide-eyed dreams, the eery and familiar blend their scents and, till they come undone, the day-dream passes for the day. We laugh on waking, reaching for the next dream in the row. Stories wield a power none can weaken because the act of faith is born familiar and dream completes what waking leaves undone. Tales are dreams that make us sigh or laugh, which dreams we dream in never-ending row to fill the blank of past and future times. How painter’s hoist their canvass is familiar as why the weaver leaves one spot undone, the reason actors pause before a laugh or spacing of the tones set in a row. Art is dreams we save for other times to last until, like ours, their substance weaken. Hey, hundred-times-told tales grow so familiar! A row of day-dreams is a book undone; then laugh, because dream-tales so rarely weaken. |
X
“It takes us certainly to solipsism,
to the suspicion that there is only one dreamer and that dreamer is every one of us.”
“It takes us certainly to solipsism,
to the suspicion that there is only one dreamer and that dreamer is every one of us.”
SolipsismO, Only One, who fills the seas as seas fill their lagoons,
Sometimes swelling with your flood, I think that I am you. The Librarian stirs and dreams a mind,
dreaming an ascetic, meditator on a saint, whose God works spectacle in his weaving of the fabric of a world held in the Librarian’s drowsing mind. The great worm, Oroboros, whose channels still are mined, container which contains its own container, for Aqua Regia the only fit receptacle, which eats all humble vessels in which swirled, but the hungry stomach and the mind. |
XI
“He begins to dream and is each one of us--not us but each one.”
“He begins to dream and is each one of us--not us but each one.”
The Librarian DreamsHear Elijah’s cry, “God, God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
– That great, intimate, ungrateful impossibility. Not death’s deep plush, not sleep’s suspense of stars,
just so much shade is needed as lurks dark behind an eyelid’s slowly lowering bar for the Librarian to take up at his mark, becoming what libraries never are, becoming not the babble all men hark, but in hind-perspective, dreaming each stiff-backed member ever in his reach. He was Peacock crying out, “Alastor!” to the palely self-distracted Shelley with a prophet’s lion-lungs; Blake’s Spectre waking in the posture of the free, that the western half-world might conjecture how self may live and die for liberty-- how woman after woman, disregarded in pursuit of perfect She, could be discarded. And he becomes the scribe with stiffening fingers, who’s joking still-life yoked the dialectic to couch Urges, for whom reverence lingers, whether dream be poet’s or fanatic’s, which to say, but picks among the singers, who scaffold life with logics or dramatics in their nervous reaching after form, we nearly wake to know has been our norm. Salt of his grief he seeks with argent tongue; and utter trudge breaks sweat to swell his tears. A Laureate among the ardent young would earn, to set beside his mortal fears, an honest laurel in memoriam, more savory to heart’s palate than to ears. In all the skills of passion to be versed, not to have lost what can be loved is cursed. He speaks as bard-physician, diagnosing “Dragon-Folded-in-the-Doorway,” shipwreck versed, first obstacle to couple-counting courtship flights of intellect and affect, called wrong-headed dead-right-reckoning or, for the times, wrong-hearted in effect-- so to spare a man a world too sage and spare the world the rarest of the age. Fly-fisherman’s wrists turn the free-soul’s three migrations--under keel-bone and under hill and love--to necessary tragedy, that raises water from the saint’s own well. He finds love and love’s alarms to be a trough it takes a man a life to fill. Such bitterness as what they call sweet love, distill, if not provided from above. As cygnet, dreading he might go for swan, he lusts to work his wiles out of class, among Berliners--where he might be wan as blanched asparagus and yet still pass the bar his conscience set its seal upon-- who will not bless his head but pat his ass. Later, with the Yanks, he seemed content, who took it always as a compliment. Cheeky as the hill-high day was young and wanting, Sir, to know what they meant by it, he marches crooked through the city-room, to have a go at the editor’s sheet, to worm fair payment for a bezel-poem, outraged to learn at lunch that lunch was it. Worried that his best had made its show-- seventeen neat whiskies in a row. Dumb then for decades, astonished exclamations at his food turned gold, his drink gold dust, his daughters and his sons to demonstrations of the Golden Rule--that life is never just, but better loud regret for fatal sins than justice self-applied, if sin one must. His hand turned hard against himself, what worse could seem than his decline, from ill to verse. |
XII
“What matters, as Coleridge said,
is the impression produced by the dream.
The images are minor; they are effects.”
“What matters, as Coleridge said,
is the impression produced by the dream.
The images are minor; they are effects.”
Old PondThat an old man sat by the old pond does not much matter,
Nor that a frog jumped in, but only the sound of water. Furuike ya: old pond
kawazu tobikomu: frog jumps mizu no oto: water’s sound – Basho Furuike ya: necessary habitat/environment/medium of existence !/indeed kawazu tobikomu: frog(s) jump/leap/tumble(ing) (in) mizu no oto: sound of water/water(‘s) (re)sound(s)/splash(es)/plop(s) Furuike ya: in the normal location kawazu tobikomu: an indistinguishable inhabitant takes a common action mizu no oto: the environment resounds with the consequence Furuike ya: look here kawazu tobikomu: a being makes a leap and disappears mizu no oto: the sound outlasts the creature’s presence Furuike ya: the world kawazu tobikomu: we do what we do mizu no oto: and leave behind some passing mark Furuike ya: life kawazu tobikomu: one writes mizu no oto: read |
XIII
“Sir Thomas Brown says
that dreams give us an idea of the excellence of the soul,
seeing the soul free of the body and engaged in play and dreaming.
He thinks that the soul enjoys its freedom.”
“Sir Thomas Brown says
that dreams give us an idea of the excellence of the soul,
seeing the soul free of the body and engaged in play and dreaming.
He thinks that the soul enjoys its freedom.”
FlotsamWhile lacking legs, it leaps; it flies, though through no air;
How fine must be the dreaming soul, to judge what rags it wears? A flotsam sail found on the beach--
what might it say about sailing? What do dreams suggest about souls? How excellent must be the soul, How skillfully it spreads itself for dream. How masterful its substanceless hand on the touchless tiller. How it bounds when it lays down the body. How it must enjoy dark freedom. |
XIV
“And Addison says effectively that the soul, when it is free of the shackles of the body,
imagines, and is able to imagine with a freedom it does not have in waking.”
“And Addison says effectively that the soul, when it is free of the shackles of the body,
imagines, and is able to imagine with a freedom it does not have in waking.”
Beautiful Dreamer
It must be, for a bubble, like a dream to surface,
Spreading on the upper air, less bursting than release. Beautiful dreamer, drift on breath of sleepers
through the walls that keep good neighbors easy, miming with the soul the syllabary tickle, “Us,” where peace so weighs its keepers. Wake us after on your pale, smooth pages dream’s undreamt-of, latent, loving ache– that, waking, sleeps with those that, sleeping, wake– beyond conception though we wake for ages. What feats of air and wicker rise above the carpentering soul, when freed in dream of journey-joining shackles to the world? What unworn paths are taken by the dove released from some high window yet unseen, that brings your leaves back tender and uncurled? |
XV
“He adds that of all the operations of the soul/mind the most difficult is invention.”
“Yet in dreams we invent so rapidly that we confuse our thoughts with our inventions.”
“He adds that of all the operations of the soul/mind the most difficult is invention.”
“Yet in dreams we invent so rapidly that we confuse our thoughts with our inventions.”
Two-Part InventionIt must be, for a bubble, like a dream to surface,
Spreading on the upper air, less bursting than release. Each bee copies out the comb, with no anxiety
As to the debt owed to that ancient, first, creator bee. The red-eyed, restless Devil never sleeps The heart, once stopped, never even creeps; and takes insomnia for industry. destruction, though, outlasts eternity; He cleaves hard to his cleft-foot cobbler’s last and yet creation’s yawns are not so vast to misrepair creation, cleat by cleat, to go unfilled with halves at dream’s first beat; not making new as much as one brass ape; the falling star will stream as glowing tape, undoing day by night in ceaseless round a speck too quick for hind-sight on the ground what any twitching kitten mother’s forth that shines for dream’s inventions as fixed north, in wide-eyed dream, when soul is free to make. while all the waking world would serve as brake. And of the machinations of the soul: The hand, committing sleights with part and whole, suffering, love, union and division, deceives both yokel heart and sharpster vision definition of its parts and powers, with prestianimatin’s silver showers; expansion in the heart to fill the void, where for castles clouds can be employed the most difficult must be invention, a fist hold love and act equate intention, the fecund act in forming of the stars imagination grows its deodars. |
XVI
“We are, as Addison said, the theater, the spectators, the actors, the story.”
“We are, as Addison said, the theater, the spectators, the actors, the story.”
Addison’s ToastWaiting so long in the green room, actors sit in the stalls,
Thinking how audience inclusion is why the show never palls. We work our own vineyard;
we wince at the dressing of a vine; we stir with the spring and shine with the sun. It is our self which fruits and bears the crush; and in the tasting of the wine, the wine tastes us. May spring sun sweeten fruit of the vines in our vineyard. May wine we crush taste of us. |
XVII
“The nightmare has a peculiar horror, and that horror may be expressed by any story.”
“The nightmare has a peculiar horror, and that horror may be expressed by any story.”
Meeting Famous MenSeveral wise men would have us know soul’s thirst is quenched with dreams;
Nightmare’s horror may be the taste of hemlock in the streams. A voice awoke me from this maze of dreaming,
a presence hand and vision passed through freely. I spoke, “The last of three whose words give gleaming lie to blindness drying vision wholly, your tongue is Argentine with gaucho-silver. Please, help me understand fear’s dreams more fully.” It seemed to me, within the dark a shiver uttered: “As you have followed me this distance, yet feel with foot unshod my foot-steps’ fever.” I spoke: “That warmth shall be my star of guidance.” “A one not distant may have words to tell you, where speech I had roused only your resistance and here, between two dreams, no words come new.” I felt myself raised up and given body; now my benefactor took his substance, too. I followed where he set his foot, and oddly felt how the searching of his orbs made path-way-- this where to my best vision all seemed foggy. So steep a path once climbed, then none may gainsay, but victory over weakness to my mentor. I gasped, at last: “I labor by the half-day and never knew such pains as these to enter in behind a place where genius had gone.” He in return: “The pain you may remember, forgetting what small thing had brought it on.” So strange, then one approached or we approached him, so strange, this place that held no hint of day-dawn; it seemed, almost, that darkness grew a limb, and calling to my guide, my voice was trembling, “What face is this I almost know through light so dim?” The one I followed turned, “His frank dissembling earned obloquy and exile for this raveler of Gordian fear and spider-works resembling. Approach and ask, as might any traveler.” “Fra Niccolo,” my voice slipped, “is that you?” “As much as spared by time, the leveler.” That small, dark head, a nose more proud than true, that weighing, portrait-gaze here stood before me. I felt that all I knew was fancy’s tissue and paused in fear to stand revealed as petty. He spoke before me. “Such a life as we live is lived by plants, volitionless but ready, to such bright looks the sun may give, responsive. You come, my son, by one bright star escorted.” Then I: “Asleep, it seems, the guards are passive; and terror nightmare wields is well reported-- a fear that leaves the bravest paralyzed and hints the world or I must be distorted. I would not be of cowardice comprised, nor would I have the world to be malignant. I beg you, tell me how it was devised, we love these ill-fit lives to death from advent? “As much and more than what you ask, I’ll tell you,” soft he responded. “But...does prince or regent usurp yet my republic and its purlieus?” My guide spoke close, within my private hearing, “Assume these have those interests which they used to, and hope old hopes, and fear what they were fearing.” So I: “Italian union stands completed. Elected leaders find dispraise too searing, but among their peers, Tuscans are well seated.” He:"‘Beh! Your inquiry, then. Thrown or fallen, man likes his lot by hemistich repeated: by this or that--choose this, where that’s befallen. It’s such a gift as one gets from a serpent, and bears such fruit as comes of stolen pollen." Then I: “The hoops by which our staves are pent, though, must be shaped and sized to fit the barrel.” And he: “In dream is where our souls invent the world, the man..., and world and man may quarrel. The stuff of dream is self as pure invention; our thread unspools there, free of catch or snarl, and soul, for such is Adam’s God’s intention, becomes the thing it works of its own substance; and so it is, that death’s anticipation brings dread, brings horror, night-mare’s common parlance. To make the self all things is dream’s vocation; unmaking him who dreams is soul’s connivance. In dream our deaths can never see completion, for close approach will melt such wings as bear us. But, though it dries the marrow, what devotion: the dreamer who undreams to nothingness!" I: “Then, Hell was made, its inside decorated, by those who rightly fear a void awaits us!” So very Tuscan, then, what went unstated in such a look. And shrugging, “Rightly, wrongly..., report has never come of what is fated. Strong dreams! the history of dreaming strongly suggests some goal for which we have no mind-space. Though repetition may direct thought wrongly, some thing must move below an active surface.” At this, my guide spoke from behind, “As ever, time here snubs short,” at which I hissed in grimace. His ghostly hand passed through my ribs to sever the moorings of my heart and drop unconscious these poor remains of me which you hear quaver this recollected dream, which may be fever. |
XVIII
A likely explanation for the puzzling nature of the universe is that it is being created backwards from the end, with each preceding moment filled to explain the one come after with infinity extending toward the vital, growing past. It would not be so strange or unfamiliar if we were to look at things precisely backward to their natures.
A likely explanation for the puzzling nature of the universe is that it is being created backwards from the end, with each preceding moment filled to explain the one come after with infinity extending toward the vital, growing past. It would not be so strange or unfamiliar if we were to look at things precisely backward to their natures.
***** Unwritten
|
XIX
“What if nightmares were cries from Hell...took place in Hell?”
“What if nightmares were cries from Hell...took place in Hell?”
NightmareIn Hell they dream of sleeping, but in Hades none sleep well;
Is it, Dreamer, nightmare to wake and watch in hell? A single, languid sleep to come and go
lends meaning to the phrase, “expedient as hell,” unless the space I cross but do not know is briefer than I hope or scriptures tell. Lent meaning by the phrase, “expedient as hell,” the arm’s-length from the incubus to us is briefer than I hope or scriptures tell and may not be my own or one I’d trust. The arm’s-length from the incubus to us may be as much a fiction as the sprite, and may not be my own or one I’d trust but more a wish inspired by my fright. Maybe, as much a fiction as the sprite, the seat of hell is settled in my heart; but more a wish inspired by my fright, I dream that horror dwells in distant parts. The seat of hell is settled in my heart, which fortress I would cede to foreign powers; I dream that horror dwells in distant parts and shy from claiming nightmare’s root as ours. A fortress I would cede to foreign powers, that takes one languid sleep to come and go, I would not take so childish a gift– as lids of certain jars I fear to lift– a useless space we cross but do not know. I think we must claim nightmare’s root as ours. |