THAT DAY

I read A.S. Byatt's The Djinn In The Nightingale's Eye. Writing up her own story as a fairytale... I wish I'd written it. Wait, that's exactly what I DO write.

The most striking scene: in Istanbul, in the Hagia Sophia, a Pakistani guy starts talking with her. Soon he's spouting "jihad!" and "death to Westerners" right in front of his wife and daughters as they wince. Appalls Byatt; scares me. If even family men think like this, we have no way to avoid eventual world war.

My regret's purely selfish--a generation of war means social stasis. MY concerns (artistic and scientific) won't be returned to until I'm old at best and more likely long dead. My work will be seen as irrelevant by these fighters for democracy and other obviousnesses--until they've won, and find they have no vision of anything beyond defeating this latest wave of tyranny.

THAT NIGHT

I get a free ticket to a local festival a bit like Burning Man. It's on a beach--lake or sea, I'm not sure. A long beach with regular pavilions for cookouts, like Juanita Beach where we swam when I was little. I'll work only an hour in a pavilion--cooking, cleanup, leading a group? I forget. Early on, my friend Mike and I buy tickets (few items at the fair cost extra, but this is separately run--a California State Historical Site?) to tour a strange mansion.

It's a whimsical mix of Victorian turrets and Spanish tile roofs and arches, enclosing a small plaza. Cavernous inside, with trees and brush--a dark stuffy forest! On its plank floor, a maze of shrines and altars to hundreds of gods from tribes around the world.

We open the garage in desperation, having searched every other room. Furniture painted over and set up to cast shadows out curtained windows--scary silhouette scenes for Halloween! They look silly compared to the real altars upstairs.

Sudden insight. I've been trying to recall a song I wrote years ago, a very early one, about this mansion! Wanted to resurrect and finish it, then pitch it to our band. But as I try to recall its melody, I become steadily more convinced I already adapted it--as the bridge in "Limpin' On the Levee" or "Gaia's Song"!

It's been with me for years, unnoticed, all along.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Guide = A.S. Byatt, I suspect
• Mansion full of altars = the Hagia Sophia in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, where she meets that horrible jihad-crazed dad from Pakistan. That is... the world's an amazing place, full of sacred sites meant to awaken our spiritual hunger. And they do! And then we snarl at each other over them like hungry dogs.
• Wrote a song on a Victorian mansion dressed up for Halloween: I often have this intricate jazz-tinged fugue playing in my head. I thought for years I made it up, until I happened to see that sixties sitcom about a Victorian house full of monsters, The Addams Family. My fugue, while much more complex, was clearly built on its theme song, as Lurch, the Frankensteinian butler, plays it on his harpsichord.
• So what's this little afterdream mean? I think it hints that our spiritual ugliness is, in the long run, best seen as Addams Family grotesquerie--comic, even perversely charming.

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