Marginalia, no.172

Today I want to try a bit of everything.

~ The Lion

My good friend W and I were cornered by this particular lion in a dream I had last week. The above was the lion’s reply after we asked if it wouldn’t rather eat an antelope or wildebeest. There’s a children’s book called The Tawny Scrawny Lion about another hungry cat. He blames his troubles on the forest animals that keep running away from him. ‘If I didn’t have to chase you all the time, I wouldn’t be so hungry and you would live longer,’ he says. It’s no use trying to preach moderation to a lion. Boundless appetite is self-defeating, you want to tell him, but how do you draw a picture of a lion that’s swallowed itself?

Marginalia, no.137

Cato who doted upon cabbage might find the crude effects thereof in his sleep, wherein the Aegyptians might find some advantage by their superstitious abstinence from onions.

~ Sir Thomas Browne, Notebooks

Within the past week: My wife adopted a pet tiger she insisted could survive on cheese; I discovered a subterranean basement below the bathtub; I saved my daughter from drowning at sea.  Then my home was invaded by birds: long-necked hawks, brightly colored owls, shoe-billed ducks and tiny songbirds that built nests atop the framed pictures hanging on the walls.  If dreams are determined by digestion, then all this seems to have started with a dish of baked fennel and parmesan.

Marginalia, no.122

There is a sinfulle state of dreames…and there may be a night booke of our Iniquities, for beside the transgressions of the day, casuists will tell us of mortall sinnes in dreames arising from evill precogitations; meanwhile human lawe regards not noctambulos, and if a night walker should breake his neck or kill a man, takes no notice of it.

~ Sir Thomas Browne, from his notebooks

I read once about an elderly man who dreamt he was wrestling a stag.  The animal thrashed desperately with its antlers but he got an arm round its neck and gave a sharp twist.  He woke to find that he had killed his wife of fifty years.  One hopes he was a great philanthropist most nights – that he dreamt of curing cancer, bathing lepers or rescuing babies from falling pianos.  It might have counterbalanced his transgression.  But if we’re culpable for our dreams maybe God is similarly bound by dreams of universal pardon.

Bibliotheca Abscondita, Title #5

The Universal Register of Personal Opinion (URPO).  This is a hardback volume with an erasable slate on the cover.  Write your question – any question – there, then open the book to find answers from various living and historical figures, listed alphabetically.  Close the book and write a different question on the cover and the contents are magically rearranged and updated.  No single answer is definitive and contradictions will abound.  Anachronism is more than half the fun since the book allows you to learn, for example, Cleopatra’s take on American health reform legislation, or Emily Dickinson’s opinion of Hammurabi’s personal hygiene.  As such, the URPO suggests that Eternity is the simultaneous presence of all time rather than a matter of infinite sequence.

Bibliotheca Abscondita, Titles #3 & #4

Seven Million Stray Dogs, by Acre.  On the cover is a Byzantine-style icon of Neil Armstrong standing on the lunar surface, his hand raised in blessing and a golden nimbus round his helmet.  The book is bound in curious triangular fashion and opens (impossibly) from two different sides.  It is covered with a clear cellophane wrapper.  Seven Million Stray Dogs is a universal almanac which I consult, in my dream, for Ikea-style instructions on assembling Italian Renaissance furniture pieces.

Hannibal at Sea, anon.  On the cover is a silhouette image of a Phoenician trireme with three elephants aboard lifting their trunks in salute.  The book is a collection of aphorisms for the strategically uncertain.

~

[NB: I've officially made this another series.  For a refresher/introduction and a link to past posts, click here.]

Avuncular Dead Frenchmen

Jules Renard appeared to me in a dream, if you can believe it.  But he was very kind.  He wanted to encourage me about the novel I’m writing.  ‘You’ll see,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be all right.’  We spoke in French, which of course I don’t speak in waking life but it was perfectly natural in the dream-state.  Renard was wearing a white buttoned-down shirt.  He smiled and put his hand on my shoulder.  ‘There are good writers and great ones,’ he said, repeating a line from his journals: ‘Let us be the good ones.’

I can settle for that.

Another ghost of a Frenchmen, Joseph Joubert, is often quoted here.  He has yet to make an appearance in my dreams.  Were he to do so, he might remind me that he himself never managed to finish a book.  There’s comfort in the failures of others.  Joubert’s notebooks were only published after his death.  Like Pascal’s Pensees, they hint at some compendious philosophical project that might someday have been completed if the author had been given enough mortal duration to polish and put it all in order. 

It would be very easy for me to die at any moment.  One never knows.  If I were to die, the only people who might read what I’ve written so far are my wife and children.  I can settle for that too.  I don’t kid myself that it is a revolutionary or “great” book.  I only hope that it’s a good one.

Bibliotheca Abscondita, Titles #1 & #2

Sir Thomas Browne left among his miscellaneous papers a catalog of imaginary books, the Musaeum Clausum or Bibliotheca Abscondita.  Included are unknown works by Ovid and Pytheas, an account of the death of Avicenna, and (my favorite) a Sub Marine Herbal ‘describing the several Vegetables found on the Rocks, Hills, Valleys, Meadows at the bottom of the Sea.’

Better than Browne’s list, however, is the library dreamt up by Rabelais, which includes such promising titles as Folk Dances for Heretics, Close Shaven Clerks (by Ockham), Advanced Asslicking for Graduate Students and the not-to-be-omitted And Cheese, Too.

Detailed descriptions of the dreams of others can make life unbearable, I know, but I’ll briefly mention a curious personal phenomenon.  For several years now I’ve had recurring dreams of an imaginary bookshop set in the middle of a city, entered by a flight of stairs from street level and extending two or three floors below ground.  It is ill-lit, dusty and labyrinthine, the best imaginable place for browsing, and I never fail to make unheard-of discoveries there among the ghostly stacks.

This is my Bibliotheca Abscondita, my bookshop of dreams.  I’ve decided to begin cataloging the titles I find there or in other dreams.  Posts for this series will necessarily be sporadic.

The first two volumes:

Cassseraghi, author unknown, trans. Mary Wortley Montagu.  An early Italian opera libretto.  The book is full of the most wonderful illustrations done in a style that somehow weds Watteau, Blake and early Picasso – harlequin figures emerge from velvety green shadows, highlighted in turquoise, red and shimmering gold leaf.

Collected Works, Augustynde.  This is a Library of America volume I’d never seen before, the collected novels and stories of a mid-twentieth century writer known only by his peculiar surname.  A photograph of the author is printed on the back cover: a latter-day Whitman with a pendulous beard, dressed in a casual-cut white suit and hat, smoking a pipe.  Most of his stories concern WWII.  Every sentence is an intense surprise and pleasure.  In my dream I can’t understand how it’s possible I’d never heard of Augustynde before.

Under Ursus Major

St Corbinian supposedly rode a bear over the Alps to Rome after it had killed his horse.  In most versions of the story he merely forced the bear to carry his baggage, but in one he actually saddled the bear and rode it, imitating, perhaps, the third-century Cappadocian martyr St Mamas who had ridden a lion.

I have recurring dreams of bears.  In one dream last week I’d unaccountably set up our camping tent mere meters from a bear sleeping on a pile of chewed limbs and mangled carcasses; I managed somehow to keep the children hushed long enough to dismantle the tent without waking it.  In other dreams I’ve been variously pursued or ignored by bears, in wild or in urban settings.  Even when they aren’t particularly threatening, my dream bears are unpredictable, objects of mute horror and chthonic dread, something like Melville’s sharks.

These dreams are probably explained by my three encounters with ursus americanus in the Sierra Nevada.  In the first, a mother bear and two cubs ransacked our campsite several times over the course of a night.  In the second, miles from any roads or assistance, an adolescent male tried to make off with my pack and food and then circled the tent, breathing heavily, till morning.  In the third, I was sleeping without a tent and woke to find a giant black bear immediately beside me tearing open a companion’s backpack, hot on the scent of an empty candy bar wrapper.

At a bookshop I once consulted a poorly conceived dream dictionary and learned that bears represent pretty much whatever you want them to represent: conflict, victory, aggression, mastery, life, death, sexual vigor, sloth, renewal, power.  The bear also, of course, symbolizes Russia, and California, and so it’s possible that my dreams are spurred by unresolved complexes left over from my Cold War childhood, or conflicted feelings for my home state.

St Corbinian taming the bear represents, I suppose, the triumph of the Apollonian over the Dionysian, civilization over barbarism, the light of the Church over pagan darkness.  My dreams are full of foreboding.  If they don’t devour me outright, my dream bears, I think, are as likely to ride me as I am to ride them.

Marginalia, no.57

Desire to be a bird, desire to become a bee.  Man feels that his happiness is in the air.  – And if we wish to become a bird, it is not an eagle, a vulture, a pheasant, a partridge, or a parrot that we wish to become, but a modest little bird gifted with amiability, a warbler, a titmouse, a robin, a nightingale, an average and innocent bird.

~ Joseph Joubert

I lack the confidence to fly in my dreams – not like a proper bird anyway.  As a child I dreamt that if I wiggled my fingers in a ridiculous sort of way I could incrementally propel myself into the far corners of the living room’s vaulted ceiling.  Nowadays, I dream that with a good running start I can jump indefinite distances, holding myself six inches above the ground by sheer force of will for as long as I like.  I would much rather dream myself into ‘an average and innocent bird.’  But like a fever or a plagued conscience, gravity imposes itself even on my sleep.  Birds are magical because they are immune.

Cecrops

I woke the other day with a strange dread of the name Cecrops.  There in bed, in the early morning dark, I actually caught myself mouthing the words: ‘…slow-motion horror of a word like Cecrops.’ 

I had to refresh my memory, but it turns out that Cecrops was a mythical early king of Athens (half man and half fish or snake) who once refereed a contest between Athena and Poseidon to choose a patron god for the city.  Each would offer the Athenians a gift, and Cecrops would select the winner.  Facing off at the acropolis, Poseidon gave the Athenians a spring of brackish water.  Athena struck a stone with her spear and up came an olive tree.  Afraid Poseidon’s unpotable spring wouldn’t be much use (not realizing it symbolized naval power), Cecrops chose in favor of Athena.  At least the olive tree would provide tangible benefits like food and fuel, he thought.

Goddess of the art of war, of cunning heroes and various crafts, Athena is also famously associated with wisdom.  (“The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings in the falling dusk” said Hegel, suggesting we only understand anything from a bird’s eye view and after dark [clears throat].)  Unable to penetrate the symbolism of the gods’ gifts, Cecrops appears to have nonetheless chosen wisely – since understanding was apparently what he lacked.  But then again, if the gifts of Greeks are suspect, the gifts of their gods are doubly so. 

In order, then, to exorcise the dread of ‘Cecrops’ from my mind, I penned the following lines, just for fun, to honor the ancient fish-king of Athens:

C E C R O P S

Old Cecrops chose the olive tree
for purely practical reasons
and handed false Minerva right
to exercise her treasons.

Unsightly scales and lacking legs
kept him from going to college
where, if he had, Cecrops had learned:
Woe drinks each night with Knowledge.