MOCA, October 1, 2009, with detail of Nancy Rubins' sculpture, Chas' Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson's Airplane Parts, About 1000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian's Beverly Hills Space, (2001-2002).

This might be as close as I can get with a camera to show you what my dreams look like.  Uncropped, uncorrected, no tripod, so the camera's sitting on a polished granite seat aimed at Bianca who's standing at the base of Nancy Rubins's sculpture, aiming her own camera at the MOCA Store windows. Believe it or not parts of Siegfried looked like this.  Lights and reflections and duplication and figures doing things you can barely make out.  What's going on?  Where are we and why are we here?  What's that pile of airplane wreckage doing hanging upside down?  Should I be worried? 

The discovery of perspective was a step in the development not just of art but of consciousness.  Or so some would believe, as I've told you before.  What I have to say now is:

Willem De Kooning (1904-1997)
The poet who wrote about a tree  (Joyce Kilmer, 1886-1918) graduated from Rutgers College Grammar School in 1904.
Eve Curie (1904-2007) grew up in Sceaux with her sister and her parents Marie and Pierre until her father was run down and killed by a horse and carriage when Eve was two.  Later when she visited America they called her "the girl with the radium eyes."

In my dreams these things are all connected and hanging upside down, balanced and tied together with invisible steel wire.

Thomas Jones, writing about Thomas Pynchon (LRB 9/10/09, vol 31, no. 17) says that:
 
"to see patterns in the chaos is to be deluded, but at the same time demonstrates the necessity of the delusion.  This isn't to say that the patterns we project onto the world, the lines we draw on the earth, are any less real, or any less consequential, for being imaginary. "

I hope so.  There are times when I think I will not be doing this for much longer.  I don't panic when I think this, I just think I should hurry up and explain to you before you get too impatient to listen.  Before you sigh and squint and dip your head because you're trying to do something else, you're focused in another direction and you think I'm not saying it fast enough or simply enough or directly enough and not getting to the point and you'll say in your exasperated voice, "But can't you see I'm busy, oh what is the point, oh what is the question, oh what are you trying to tell me?" 

Secretly, however, you are thinking I've told you before.  Llike Bianca said she used to do with a boyfriend: you raise two fingers.

"It's what his mother used to do to his father," she explained, meaning the boyfriend's mother and what he saw her do to his father.  "You hold up two fingers.  It means, 'You already told me, and now you're telling me twice.'"

Oh it must be satisfying, I admit, to be the one who gets to raise the two fingers, isn't it, yes it is.  And that's what I worry about.  That I will never be that one.  (Not that I want to be.)  That I'll be the one who keeps trying to tell you the same thing over and over, again and again, the way it happens in dreams.  Never getting there, never getting it right but hoping you'll understand anyway.  

Of course, half the time I don't understand it myself, which is part of the problem.  I'm afraid of not making sense.  But lately I have been waking up in the middle of the night to find myself in the darkness, flat on my back with my arms stretched over my head.  It's not an especially comfortable position, which is why I wake up.   Do you think it's surrender?