Circ Cervine
Dreamed 2016/9/16 by Wayan
For the dancers of Circ de Soleil
THAT DAY
I work on the World Dream Bank all morning: take and lay in photos of my hypnogogic sculpture Bed Vortex (left).
My poet-friend Patagia calls. We haike around McLaren Park--duck pond, geese, turtles. Walking back, an idiot nearly causes a 3-car crash.
On the way home, stop at the ATM, the grocery, the library. A blonde teen with sexy face, bare belly, short skirt and long tan thighs, stepping graceful as a deer, is everywhere I go--getting cash, groceries, books... But she ignores me, mom by her side. Sigh!
Home frustrated. Crawl into bed with Ailura, my giant furry hand-sewn catgirl. Imagine I'm a cat too, and rock until I come.
Get up refreshed. Listen to Jayne Entwhistle read The Dead in their Vaulted Arches. As Flavia de Luce meets and disapproves of her precocious little cousin--an uncomfortable mirror to her own precocious little self--something nags me. Takes an hour to come conscious: Entwhistle also read Virginia Woolf's part in Priya Parmar's Vanessa And Her Sister. The only two audiobooks I've heard Entwhistle in, and both are about gifted siblings with weak/absent parents--the fictional de Luces, the very real Bells (core of the Bloomsbury Group).
I like to hear of gifted, neglected sibling-sets--since I grew up in one. It's not a common pattern. In fiction you mostly hear about sibling rivalry. Alien to me! You can't afford rivalry if siblings are all you've got--when adults are unreliable. Or dead.
As Jayne Entwhistle talks, I sew on Vixtoria, my giant furry sculpture/plushie of a fox-taur: reshape her throat, neck, and thorax. Next I need to slim her forelegs. The faux foxfur I got is long and will visually fatten the legs, so I gotta trim the armature way down...
THAT NIGHT
I'm wandering the site of a circus, Circ Cervine, before they've opened. Tents up, but still trucks unloading. Dancers in sequined trapeze outfits practice their routines on parked floats and trucksbed. I walk the aisles between floats, looking up. Some are human, some are gracile centauroids, more deerlike than equine, though longtailed. Real--though some human girls are costumed as centaurs, and vice versa!
I stop at a float with a striking tableau. Two bipedal girls with deer legs, mare-tails... no, one has a loose head! Just a realistic mannequin. Deeriquin? Yet the other's living, real, a doe-eyed dancer. A third figure, human, living, is trying a headstand squeezed between them--they help support her, but her arms and hair are tangled in their legs and hooves. Looks simultaneously intimate and... awkward.
I try sketching them, feeling like it's symbolic--the Three Graces, one a deer, one a human yoga nut, one plastic! That's got to mean something... doesn't it?
But I get stuck, drawing. On the page, reduced to two dimensions, I just can't show the headstander so she makes visual sense--she seems behind both or in front, not between. Or even a later sketch superimposed, accidentally upside down, not with them at all. I erase the headstander. But the two alone, doe and deeriquin, look slightly empty--the doe looking at the hole where her friend (lover?) got erased. Censored. By a dream-artist lacking the technique to clearly render someone upside down and tangled...
The story of this transhuman circus is now a graphic novel being presented in the big hall by its authors. A publication party, or is this at a comics con? The fancy multimedia presentation ends with live dancers. Mere deer masks, though. All human, sigh!
The book's art is quite sexy--way better than my sketches. I want a copy, but see none for sale at the book table--is it out yet? So I sketch & note the names instead, so I'll can buy it later. The writer is R. Greystoke. See the artist's name too, but forgot (nearly lost Greystoke). The working title is long & forgettable; don't even try to recall it, since I'm sure it'll change for publication. Too clumsy to be final. Kind of like my dream art...
I sketch-map the circus I wandered early in the dream, before it all retreated to a not-quite-published book. The site was a long wedge of meadow; in one corner all was circles, from round cafe tables to round raised stages. Other corners have squares or hexagons...
Why sketch when I'm not nearly as good as the comic-artist? Am I just cheap? No, it's more. I half-sense it's a dream, that even if I can buy a review copy, I won't get to keep the book--when I wake, only my own dream notes will survive.
All I get to keep of their strange beauty is what I can render--poor echo though it is.
NOTES IN THE MORNING
Without that sketching inside REM, I think all would've been lost. Drawing within my dreams made me recall the figures' complex entanglement well enough to render at least a deeriquin of the dream for you. And me.
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