Extract from a Poem in Progress
Dreamed c.1972, written 1982 by D.M. Thomas
...I fell in love with love and poetry.
A dream, from ten years back, has stayed with me. I was in Truro Cathedral, listening To a dreadful woman-pianist called Lees; But then the Bishop announced that she was not Called Lees, but Orchard, an illegitimate Daughter of a shop-girl from Canterbury And T.S. Eliot. The fingers at the keys
In Cornwall; Audrey Orchard, a soprano.
Pure as Marina... What images return,
But what the dream was really telling me,
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SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.3, no.1, fall 1982, p.4)
EDITOR'S NOTE
Thomas knows his Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation; his best-known novel The White Hotel (1981) has Sigmund Freud treating a woman with psychosomatic illness and eerie dreams of a white hotel. Doctor and patient are equally unaware they're premonitions of the Holocaust. Black black humor, but one of the best critiques of Freud's limitations. So I was startled to see just that sort of dogmatic interpretation in the poem: Jungian, in the equation Truro Cathedral=womb=mom (not, say, childhood, religion, patriarchy, the past or architecture; and Freudian, in pianist=penis=sex, not, say, performing/interpretive art (in contrast to Thomas's and Eliot's solitary creative art), or practice versus innate talent...
But then I play keyboard, and struggle for dexterity, and see it wax and wane with my health not with practice... just as I too interpret my own dreams psychologically, only to find later they were literal and predictive.
Not that I disagree with the old Jungian's advice: "Cleave to the illegitimate and you won't go far wrong."
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