May 5, 2011

I had fallen asleep with the intention of having Robert Kelly's collaboration with Brigitte Mahlknecht (The Garden of Distances) lead me into a dream that would, in the morning, allow me to formulate an essay about Robert Kelly's poetics for the Logic of the World: Poetics of Robert Kelly symposium. 

The dream was an expansive geography -- as if I was in a video game simultaneously aware of the map and where I was on it. I was following my old boss, Derek Owens, out of a small doorway at St. John's University (where I recently quit my job) and into woods. Not wilderness, but woods cleared by smooth paths. I was aware that Derek did not want me following him, but the dream had no other purpose and I had a strong desire to do so, so he didn't have a choice. He led me to a circle of houses, and I entered one of them. I was very happy to see that there were lots of people there including Lee Ann Brown and her daughter Miranda. My daughter was there with some of her friends who are boys, and they all wanted to play football. So I said ok, let's play football in the house. (There wasn't any furniture.) I found a huge blue ball and started throwing it around, but realized that it had holes in it and so was letting out lots of air. I then realized that beetles were eating the ball from the inside, which really grossed me out. I tried to throw the ball far away from the house, but it landed only a couple feet from the door. Derek (who was outside) took the ball and tried stuffing it into a hole around the side of the house but this was very upsetting to me because I didn't want the beetles anywhere near the house. So I went outside (not where I wanted to be) and tried to pull the ball out of the hole where he had stuffed it, but it kept getting longer and longer. Obviously there was a part of it that was stuck for good.