THAT DAY

I'm reading Robert Moss's The Secret History of Dreaming. He makes me face that I've betrayed my dreams' demands in two key areas: they've said clearly that they want me to date again and apply to grad school. I've made only token attempts to comply. Tribal shamans would have no trouble explaining my current illness: soul loss! Not theft; I threw my dreams away. To heal, I have to act on them.

And I don't know how. I just can't seem to. The illness meant to spur me has drained me so much I can't face the challenges... barely get through the day's demands. Feel deadlocked.

So I do what I always do when trapped: retreat into art.

First I finish illustrating the dream-poem Oh, Wait (left).

Then I design a web-comix version of Franchise (upper right)

Then I expand the tour of Thuvia Upland on my imaginary planet Tharn (right)

Then I add some watercolor landscape-sketches to Pegasia (lower right).

Back up all this new work and start to index it. Oh, I'm sick all right. No energy at all. Yeah.

THAT EVENING

I read the saga Sigurd and Gudrun, in Tolkien's translation. Rhythms and alliterations in Nordic poetry are unlike Latin ideas of regular meter. It's not just chance flashes of barbaric splendor, or poetry whose natural rhythm gets lost in translation; it's an irregular but strict polished form consciously aiming (through compression and outrageousness) for those flashes of splendor.

Tolkien's interpretation of Odin is startling. He's treacherous as Loki toward the heroes he helps, because his long-range purpose is to harvest these heroes; it's prophesied only a mortal dragonslayer who's gone through death can defeat the Midgard Worm at Ragnarok. Valhalla's no mere brawler's heaven but a training camp--a variant of Arthur's sleeping knights who'll save Albion. So Tolkien doesn't find the Norse tragedies tragic, exactly; they're sacrificial and preparatory. Or is he imposing a Christian myth on the Norse? Yet the evidence is there. The father-god sacrifices his own son so that Sigurd resurrected can save us all. Tolkien's just noticed the implications--why the Norse version of the All-Father's even crueler than Jehovah, sacrificing all his children. He's not a jealous God; nor a loving one. He's recruiting.

This does fit my impression of the Icelandic sagas: the Norse worldview's not tragic or fatalistic, just harshly pragmatic, admiring those who can make hard decisions. And in mythic terms, empowering: for only humans, not the gods, can save the world from darkness.

THAT NIGHT

I dream a freighter groaning with sweetest Chinese jade struck a long-jawed greedy reef. A West Saharan horde swarms from clayslums out to help pale and shivering crew ashore through vicious surf. But helps the cargo, too! Their silky haul percolates pirate-swift through all Africa: green bruise of luxury. Spreads still! Walk a fair with me-- velvet veins amid tawdry jewelry. Small-time booths. We amateurs now carve and sell this top-rate stone: the waxgoldgreen, the marbletawn. And what do we carve? Well, that one the tourist rings she's always done in plastic soft and cheap. And he fakes antiques: achieves ancestral sleek, though all is borrowed fire. And yet... she carves, inside her hilltop hut, intimate scrimshaw dreams she never could scroll in the local coarse-grained wood.

Salvaging jetsam ain't a crime. No, this is simply how our webworld is. Out of the hands of experts! All cranks with loot. Deep roots, farewell! In fairness, we self-taught can be original, and backed by Wikipe- dia, some pirate erudites flower. Problem is our foundations botch. Cracks yawn shoddy. Miscarpentry mars our Rodia Towers of cool debris. Teacherootless, we can't tell what's chaff, what's vital. Will we amateurs ever evolve the skill to carve our soul's sweet shape? Not me so far! Heft dreams all made of lovely long-to-be-filigree jade, and here I squat, slum bungler! I pick up my drill, but know I will betray the depth of my dream. The prime stone so velvet gleams! Small-time gone wrong. Forgive me, all; forgive my bunglesong.

NOTES AND GUESSES

• Western Sahara: Morocco invaded a generation ago, though the UN still rejects its claim and the Polisario Front holds all but the coastal strip. I think the dream chose Western Saharans to salvage the wreck because it sees them as the ultimate dispossessed. At least Palestinians get some aid and recognition.
• Salvaged/looted jade: Tolkien's picture of Norse poetry rooted in a lost worldview and esthetic. His Oxford lecturenotes opened up a world I hadn't understood. Because what I'd been told, in both Wagner and public school, was censored... or simply wrong.
• Cultural traditions exist for a reason: Gordon B just sent me a transcendent dream, Strange Service, but added he hasn't explored his obvious psychic abilities because "I haven't found a suitable teacher." I wrote back "You don't need teachers; the scientific method (and I mean just trial-and-error plus honest data-recording) will guide you just as well as most teachers, and without the risk of being boxed in by another's ideology." This dream points out that the self-taught often miss things they need to know.
• Woman carving dreams in a poor tropical hill-town: a recurring theme in my dreams. Example: The Air Burundi Paintings
• Deep roots, farewell! quotes a line by Tolkien about Aragorn and his kin the Rangers: "deep roots are not reached by the frost." He means unbroken cultural traditions, even if kept alive by just a handful of diehards. Change is our left leg but tradition's our right. Don't argue one's more important.
• Rodia Towers: Simon Rodia, a classic outsider artist, built beautiful towers of junk in LA. Famous now, but the towers are fragile, hell to preserve.
• Just before bed, I resented how my dreams nag me to go to grad school. I wish they'd at least say where to apply and how to afford it! This dream's a start--at least it explains why I need advanced education--to fill in blind spots. How I wish Tolkien had been my literature professor! World-class universities, despite elitist biases, at least aim at comprehensive cultural grounding--filling in gaps, correcting pop culture's simplified myths...
• ACTION: Research grad schools, I guess. But not in modern art! In writing, literature, myth and dream.
• Wait--one more action: get my Dreamverses out there despite their amateur crudity. For they address a core issue of our age. Without cultural traditions helping us to read our dreams--night or day--we're damn near all amateurs hefting true jade. A dragonhoard we lack the tools to work.
• This is Dreamverse #64. Sixty-four dream-picture-poems! And, at last, the last.

  In my hut alone, I've polished one dream in every chessboard square, for each Yi Jing hexagram. There: good or ill, I'm carved out now. I'm done.

  Dream well, little rabbits, little burglars. Dream well.

  --Chris Wayan--

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