the weird off-brand auto called

Imperial, its base model the “Marvin,”

the seaplane coming in for a landing

over the streets of Flushing, tiny diner

with a long line for the men’s room,

and the dark car parked by City Hall

with C---- H------- in it and a monk

friend of mine, both strangely com-

panioned by unscheduled women, both

men a little shy, I told a man

beside me just to have something

to say how I would love a seaplane

to have one to roar down on Long

Island Sound for a landing by night.

He said nothing. All the new

Marvins in the dealer’s lot were

shiny two-tone green and white.

RUNNICLE.

A runnicle is an image left over from dream left in the mind at waking, an image or fact with no narrative content or context.
This information is itself a runnicle, I wake with it, and hurry to write it down to share this runnicle with the dream community.

In my dream, the violinist Julia Fischer paused before the cadenza and explained to the audience how the new cadenza she was about to have the honor of playing had been composed by young Mr Paul [ ], present in the audience, who had in fact written it not for her, Julia, but for [ ], the distinguished concertmaster of this orchestra -- who also seemed to be present. The explanation went on and on; at first I too was present as she explained, then absent, reading the transcript of her remarks (but the concert hall sounds and feelings were still all around me), which at first were in German (we are after all in Kiel, in the Kieler Schloss), then in English. At first it seems that the concertmaster was alive and well, and had graciously yielded to the young Julia the right of first performance. But then it seemed she actually was dead, and Julia was about to play this new cadenza in her memory. The dream ended before the cadenza began.

I wake with a sense of almost intolerable burden. In my left hand is a scrap of parchment with a fragmentary brightly hand-colored coat of arms, all floriated. I understand that these are the arms of the Archduke. The one who shot himself – or was murdered — at Mayerling. And it seems I know at once that this was the most critical event in European, or even world, history of its era. Strangely, the sense of burden, a personal burden I must carry or discharge, immediately lifts off me when I hear or see or say the word “Archduke” – it is replaced instead by an immense sadness. No one can do anything about that death. It is so sad. Suicide saddest, murder viler. Fully awake now I cannot endure being in bed. I get up. It is almost light. In the distance I hear a snowplow clearing the road.

[dream etymologies, 1]



family.

        I dream that 'family' is as if from the Latin verb, fo, fare, ‘to speak.’

Then family means

                                the people who talk to each other.

Our word 'fate' comes from that verb too -- fatum, 'what has been spoken.'


So familiar things are:

        the things that speak for us.

        And sometimes to us.



[dream etymologies, 2]


In dream I learn that the phrase

                        vain scrutiny

is a technical term, and means a secret meeting or covert illegal assembly. At first I think this must be a mistake or mistranslation in the book I’m reading (I’m often reading a book in a dream).



But then in the dream I go to the dictionary, which gives that as the proper meaning indeed of the phrase, evidently a calque or translation from a Slavic expression – I see the Russian phrase in Cyrillic.



In the story I had been reading when the phase cropped up, the illicit meeting had been infiltrated by police provocateurs.

I dreamt I was reading a story about a young writing prospect who was writing a story. His story was a simple one, a mystery of the old-fashioned kind, a crime, a detective. a side-kick, some traveling around in an unknown country, a wise old priest, a solution. When he was finished, it was barely long enough, but was long enough, to be a novel, so he set about finding a publisher. But first he showed it to his friend. The friend showed him the faults, and suggested ways of correcting them. First of all, the novel, if it was a novel, was disproportioned – the opening and entrainment of the narrative took too long, the denouement and proffered solution were too hasty – it felt more like a collapse than a completion. The book had the wrong shape. So it has to be longer. But above all, this novel lacked intellectual and aesthetic significance. Even in a detective story, he said, we want more than plot. We want the sense that what we’re reading is important. Give us this sense.

So the young writer hearkened to his friend, took back the manuscript and set to work. He darkened the story, deepened the characters, brooded on the landscape, discovered wiser things for the wise old priest to talk about, things that actually did seem pretty interesting, about architecture and its effect on churchgoers, about what happens to the soul when people look at trees in autumn, that sort of thing. The young writer was happy, he liked this repacking and embroidering, and soon the novel was twice as long. He showed it to his friend, the friend was satisfied, this is a really good piece of work you’ve done.

It wasn’t long before a publisher took an interest (this is a dream, remember) and gave the young writer a decent contract; soon enough the book was published, the little reviews like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly were raves, the book got into the windows of small bookshops, and had two stacks of itself on a prominent table at every B&N. Sales were impressive, though not remarkable. The young writer walked about in a swoon of delight.

Then the real review came. Big as his ambitions, serious as his novel – was it in the NYRB, or a monthly? – the review savaged the book. It told the writer what perhaps he suspected all along: the plot was compact and intelligible, the characters plausible, the local-color set pieces effective – it was, the reviewer said, a very clever piece of work. It had muscles, good bones, fair reach – but it had no heart. No heart at all. Just clever workshop stuff, a do-it-yourself project with no soul.

So the young writer went home and shot himself. In the head, or the arm, or the belly, but not in the heart. He had learned that he had no heart to aim at. Later that day, an indifferent world received the news of his by now predictable decease.

At this point in the dream, I became aware that the last sentence I had just read was a variation, parody, of the famous last sentence of Thomas Mann’s The Death in Venice, about the shocked and respectful world receiving the news of Aschenbach’s death. I realized that there was more to this sad little story I had read than I thought at first. I realized (how?) that the story actually came from a collection of linked tales, a whole book of them called Kafka’s Brother. And that the ‘friend’ spoken of in the story, who gets the boy to spoil his work with false ambitions, is actually the Kafka’s brother of the title, the unknown accompanist who guides many generations of young writers unerringly towards illusory public success and profound personal despair. It is Kafka’s brother who whispers big plans, who guides the writer’s hands towards plausible solutions and away from the structures of thought and poetry. So it is to escape Kafka’s brother that some writers on their deathbeds cry out No, burn all my work!

Walking through Los Angeles, a seedy outlying tract more like old Brooklyn or Chicago, vacant lots stretching out, rare buildings. One of them in a building all by itself, like the last house left standing from a row of attached houses, is an old bookstore: in the window are ranged impressive sets of leather-bound volumes: one multi-volume set "The Flora of New Guinea." I call out to Ted Enslin who is walking with us, and prompt him to look in the window. We are astonished at that set -- of course the store is closed.

Dreamt a doctor took care of us last night

after solving our little medical dilemma

let us stay the night in his odd office



you woke early in our cramped corner

and slept again more comfortably

on his examination table cushioned, blanketed



my problem was to wash or shower

but the shower was in an ordinary room

wooden floor, couldn’t grasp the concept



how wash without ruin room

washed gingerly with hand and towel

and no one woke, Dr Bident was gone



a kindly mousy little man

like Ralph Gordon fifty years ago

who taught us the scansion of English prose.

The male voice said: “On the 29th of May, 1904, on the western approaches to the Zamorek Bridge, two cars collided. One, slightly damaged, proceeded on its way to Zamorek without further incident. The other, in which I was, toppled down the embankment into the river, where I drowned. Please read me all the information you can find about this incident, including all the auditorium reports.” I understood the word auditorium as the speaker’s mistranslation of a word that means forensic. At the next opportunity, I went to the relevant section of the archives and began assembling the reports requested. As I was lifting the files onto the desk, my telephone rang. An official voice said that a Permissions Command had just been issued by the central office, expressly forbidding all research into the very case with which I was busy at the moment…

(At this moment the voice of the archivist ceased, and I woke up, anxious to transcribe the information the dream had recounted, as I have just done.)

I had given a reading in the West Village, and now was walking up West Street under the highway with a few members of the audience. We stopped at an outdoor café, and had drinks and coffee. There was a tall bluff man from Copenhagen – not the first time a Dane had appeared in this connection. As we sat and talked, a yellowjacket came and stung me on the ball of my left thumb. I plucked the insect out as gently as I could and tossed it on the pale table. Someone went to crush it, but I coaxed it very gently with a spoon until it pulled itself together –the words seemed almost literal—and flew away, apparently all right. But there was a stinger still stuck in my thumb. I pulled it out, no pain yet, though I anticipated it. I licked the puncture steadily. No pain, but the skin around the wound started to granulate oddly, till a patch as big as an old 5 DM coin (that was the example that occurred to me) was lumpy with painless granulations. I kept licking, and gradually the swellings went down.

I went on walking north; now only one person was with me, a lean middle-aged pleasant philosophical type from Amsterdam. We talked about his city while we walked through mine. Presently we turned right, onto a crosstown street. We had come into a neighborhood that only I ever seem to find in New York, where the houses are separated by little gardens, vegetable plots, vacant fields. We walked east, and suddenly I saw a woman leaning against a tree, and talking on a cell phone. It was Lynn Behrendt! How strange to find her here in New York. Her face lit up with delight when she recognized me, a pleasure I shared, though mitigated by a sense of guilt that I had not let her know about the reading. But how could I have known she’d be in New York, apparently living there in a nice house not so different from her Linden Avenue house upstate?

She welcomed me, I introduced my Dutch companion, and we all went inside. Her business partner, an older, white-haired rubicund man, quiet, industrious, was arranging on various plates pastries they had made. They were running a catering business, and from the look of the many sorts of pastries, they must have been very good at it. The plates, though, seemed a little less than worthy of the petits-four and profiteroles that adorned them – one of them reminded me of a saucer I had broken just the day before.

But Lynn was still on the phone, and, it turned out, talking to someone who had been at my reading, and was telling her about it, evidently raving about it. She handed me the phone, saying it was Liz or Lisa. But the voice on the other end was clearly a man’s, and vaguely familiar. He’d been at the reading, liked it, the poems I’d read from May Day, and above all the poem called “The Lure.” There was no such poem in the book, or in all my work, as far as I could tell, but I didn’t want to say that. The voice, which I began to think might be that of Ron Silliman, went on, and we signed off after a little confusion about his exact e-mail address – now many M’s in it? I knew that Lynn would know, so I handed the phone back to her to finish her talk.

I didn’t taste any of the pastries, but examined them with interest. Though I strangely felt no urge to taste them – perhaps because I knew they were being prepared for a major event. As I was looking at them, a small plate (like the one I had broken at home the day before) seemed to fall by itself off the table and smash, with its three or four petits-four, onto the floor. My fault, I said, though clearly it wasn’t. Think nothing of it, the white-haired man said.

Originally, I had planned to stay the night in New York, at some midtown hotel I had not yet chosen. But somehow after the beesting and the nice meeting with Lynn and the odd phonecall and the broken dish, as if all that could happen had happened, I realized it would be better to drive home tonight. So I left without long farewells and walked north again, towards the midtown parking garage where the Subaru was waiting.