A dream, to keep up with the fellow dreamers  5/28/20

I'm in some kind of military camp, running around on an uneven rock-strewn field with my platoon/team, doing maneuvers, playing some sort of frisbee game, like a big game of monkey in the middle played by teams. We're having fun, keeping fit, making some great throws and catches, leaping off a rock to grab the frisbee and then rolling landing. Rob Wilson, the head of the St. Francis Prep English dept. is our laid-back sergeant. He's that type in real life too, the guy who's cool as long as you're cool. He motions us off the field where we go to a long "mess" table. There are other platoons sitting at other tables, a loud raucous lunch scene. At each place setting there is nice linen, silver-wear, filled water glasses, a wine glass, and I'm delighted to see that, at every setting, there are identical glass-pipes with the bowl filled. I can't believe it and think, well, I guess this is the future. It's legal, so it's just like having an afternoon drink. But I note that I'll have to be careful and keep my composure. (This likely came up because I watched the season finale of High maintenance last night, which was, in part, about being judged by family for being "a stoner", so I think my dream self was normalizing this. Reader, I cried when the guy's name was casually revealed by his niece at the end of the episode.). We eat and move into the next room where a rock band is setting up to play, 6 guys or so, ridiculously good, nice harmonies, a unique sound I can still hear, but hard to describe. Maybe the band Spoon would be a close fit. Something interrupts them, but I'm not sure what, a disturbance, like a small earthquake. The band stops. I start talking to a kid and we are talking about dreams, about what happens after we die, about the end of the world. We get interrupted again, like you do at parties, and then I'm talking with someone else in deep conversation. Things are getting messy, like a food fight, or something. Everything keeps jostling around, a drunken party feeling. There is an egg dripping down the front of the guy I'm talking to. The first kid comes back because he wants to continue our conversation and asks me if I would be able to "control myself" in an apocalypse. I think about it and say, "control myself, that's a good way to put it. Yes, I think I could control myself. I would be in frantic action, trying to keep my head and protect and serve as best I could. I would I would be freaked out, and it would be intense, but I've done enough meditation practice that I THINK I would be able to control myself, and be present to appreciate the intensity of it, even if I am screaming."  

 

"Yeah," he says, "and it could come anytime, even on a beautiful day like today." 

"I know that's the wild part, it can interrupt the dream of life anytime."  

Then I hook up with some other kids, a boy and a girl. A couple. We are on some kind of walkway for a while, a bridge made out of tree branches. It is tricky going. The boy breaks out an instrument and plays it. It's like a guitar stick with two strings. He plays a sick intricate fast pattern, which seems totally intrinsic to him. The girl hands me another instrument. We are on a train now, in a big round booth, like at a diner, This instrument, like the other one, is homemade, with a sturdy tree branch at its center. This one has one string attached to it, which you can play by hitting it with a stick, and at the top of the instrument there is a metal bulb with notes written around it, like a concave metal drum. It takes me awhile to figure it out, and they laugh at me, in a nice way, as I work at it. There are more people in the booth now, watching. The girl helps me. I start to make patterns on the notes of the drum. The G note is marked "G" and below it, scratched into the drum, is written, Jerry Garcia. I start playing "You know our love won't fade away." Buddy Holly's Ur song, covered by the Dead. I get pretty into it. I look up and the train car booth is now filled with friends. Tyler, his brother Todd and Karen Marder are there. They are all looking at me with a funny expression that I can't quite interpret. At first I think their expression is one of being pleased with the music, but then I notice they all have their hands in their pants. They are waiting for me to get the joke, and I finally do. 

I just had a "funny" dream in which I was leaving a museum and I saw on the outside of it a large image of myself, sculpted out of clay. My legs were spread and I was masturbating in a bed of flowers with a dildo. (I had a vagina.) The piece was called, "The Failure of the Personal."

I immediately knew that the piece was by Brice Hobbs and was meant to embarrass me, but not in a mean way. So I laughed. 

Then the next piece of the "movie" on the side of the museum showed Brice in process sculpting the piece, first the flowers and then the vulva. They were almost exactly the same shape. I realized then that something else was going on here besides making fun. 

But "Failure of the Personal?" Was this a critique? 

So I called Brice up (in the dream) and he gave me a long explanation of the piece that was terrific, but had nothing to do whatsoever with my take on it. I can't remember what he said though. 

I also dreamed this line last night, in a different dream, 

"Sweet leaf Keats drew my whole life over. It gave flesh to me."

Dad Burn dadburn

  Dad burn


Vaa cuum!

Suck you!

Walking through the huge funeral and get cool in the shade light breeze, strong smell of bounce fabric softener, floral, and artificial, Listening to the sun records singles compilation, single best singles compilation ever made, having just got it cut by a Mexican Barber, World Cup, I'll be up all of the upset, he and how is the value of the teams see what countries, à la Cinderella stories Senegal and Japan. And how hard it is to root for Russia and why it is that fair? It out your Waze good while he didn't after the boys on Telemundo, channel 47 locally, is 10 times better in the announcers see on American English US primetime. He is a downright scat singer of excitement. He is like the front man, and a back up band is too weird you Tatian mutating tone of the horn's entire crowd seems to be cue. Playing. Between the two and he'll cut, I in the state somebody. I tell Junior, the Barber, to shave quotation marks on each side of my head. Took him a minute to figure out I was joking. I'm not sure I was. No lock to him to sign the girls up for swim lessons. Holding it down.

as good as anything

"You tasted it. Isn't that enough?"  -Philip Roth

Violet-tinted white sky behind brick-red house behind periwinkle umbrella passing by fading pink Magnolia tree behind shiny black and candy red cars behind cobalt blue tennis trophy behind blonde wooden dolphin in a white metal cloud. Also in frame to left is Uri Aran's plaster sculpture cast from a plastic cup lid -which we got as a souvenir of the Jewish Museum art-give-away show, "Take Me I'm Yours."

letter to Jim Jarmusch

Dear Jim

I don't know you, but your film, Paterson, knows me. It gets me. 

First the name; your man Paterson is played by Adam Driver. Driver plays a driver, the original driver, Adam. That's odd, to have the actor, himself, bringing the right name for playing a part, the bus driving ur-citizen of William's ur-town. 

The movie is, in part, through the character of Everett, about what it means to be an actor, how acting is tied to personal drama, so the fact that the actor, Adam Driver, is tied into the drama, by his very name, is noteworthy. And more than this, the actor is tied into the film via the character, having been partly written for him. This is evinced in the scene after the heroics in the bar in which you see a photo of Adam Driver in his marine uniform. This is not a staged photograph for the film, right? The actor himself, like Paterson, was in the service. Or perhaps its better to say Paterson, because the actor who played him was in the service, is in the service. Paterson's twin is, in this sense, the man playing him, Adam Driver, and vice versa, just as we are always, in a sense, the character we play.

I am an Adam too (A twin of sorts. Adam 2? Adam 12?). I love to drive. Once I put out a book of poems about driving cab in San Francisco on Kevin Ostedal's Blue Press called, "Men Who Found Out." In that book there is a poem for Ron Padgett.

Ron is a friend and mentor. Once, via an e-mail with Bill Berkson, Padgett claimed that I cheated on a test about how many "Fs" are in a particularly tricky sentence by using the double F in my last name as a "viewfinder." Twin Fs. I can't help but see that now as a precursor to all of that twinning in Patterson.

I also had a memorable moment with Ron standing in front of a group painting by George Schneeman of him and his friends 40 odd years ago, naked and sitting around a living room. I asked him if he remembered it. He said, "I sure do! It was my birthday." He was in his birthday suit.

I don't want to digress TOO much here, but I really want to tell you the story Bill Berkson told me at that show about the glorious Schneeman portrait of Bill, also naked, looking like a god, and how it got its curious yellowish color. It was rescued from an apartment fire. But maybe you've got to see that specifi color of yellow for this story to have any meaning. I've never seen another yellow like it. Speaking of yellow, the first time I met Bill he told me he liked the yellow of my shirt. So that's a hint of how I feel about Bill. 

Okay so back to the movie and driving. My initials are AWD. I see my initials all the time on cars, as if they belong there. I drove taxi-cab in San Francisco all through the 90s. "Very poetic". Like a bus driver, like meteorologist, like a doctor, like a film-maker. Aha!

I loved that you put your own words into the mouth of a ten year old girl in the movie, and the way Laura says about this poem that it is "almost like" Paterson's, which is to say, I suppose, that Jim Jarmusch's poem is almost like Padgett's. That was a nice touch. 

But the thing that gets me is that the girl is so much like my daughter, Sofia, who is 8, and the girl's poem reflects one of hers. "It's almost like one of yours."

Here's the poem. First, some background. One day Sofia and I were looking at the moon behind some clouds and Sofia said it looked like a ghost moon. I said that would be a good name for a band, Ghost Moon. I asked her what would be a good name for the title of the first album and she immediately said, "A Wishing Swirl." I said that was a good title, but now we needed a song with that name. She made up the lyrics and a melody then and there and I tried to keep up writing them down. 

A Wishing Swirl

A wishing swirl falling down a waterfall

As delicate as a rose petal

As strong as a marble hall

How far it falls from way up tall

How far it falls from way up tall

The misty mist has a strange and twisted twist

Like a monk's last kiss 

Like Mona Lisa's fist

Opening into bliss

Opening into bliss

A swirling wish fluttering in the sky 

As if it were a butterfly

On a starry starry night

In different colors very bright

And everything is going right

The actress that plays Laura is a ringer for my wife. There was the scene where Paterson and Laura go to the movies. (I always like going to the movies in a movie.) They watch the movie and Paterson points out that Lara looks like the woman in the movie, "The Island of Dr. Moreau". And suddenly I'm thinking about my wife as a reflection of Laura, who is a reflection of the "Panther" woman in Dr. Moreau, and how strange that kind of exoticism is, and how I'm implicated in this strangeness. I wasn't really so conscious of it before this movie, just how much attraction is based on impulses we are not aware of. I mean I always just thought it was her smile that got me, but if I'm honest it was more than that. And yet, and yet, to echo Paterson's poem to Laura,"There is no one in the whole world like my own pumpkin. And if I lost her I'd rip my heart out and never put it back. How embarrassing."

Pumpkins. Here's one more poem for you before I sign off, more of a song really, about pumpkins.

Pumpkin Seeds

See them grow, watch them grow,

Pumpkin seeds from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

Pumpkins shining in the sun.

See them glow, watch them glow.

Jack o' lanterns from nothing.

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to jack ' lanterns

Carve 'em up with a knife.

Scare all the kids on Halloween.

Betty Lu, she's my grandma.

Betty Lu makes pumpkin pie. 

Pumpkin pie from nothing. 

From nothing to pumpkin seeds.  

From pumpkin seeds to pumpkins.

From pumpkins to pumpkin pie.

Serve it up with cool with cream,

straight from cow, from breast of cow.

 

Thanks for capturing it all in a film. 

Aff,

Adam DeGraff

P.S. Oh yeah, how about when I saw Wu Tang in the city and the sound went out and so they had to do the show a capella? It was better that way! It was like Method Man practicing his Paul Lawrence Dunbar rap in front of the washing machines. A great memory. I love the easter egg in that scene too, the sly reference to Dunbar's poem "The Paradox"  

moment by mom

Operation "missing I" 

in opera town where war is waging. 

What does it mean to a soldier to dance? 

It means dodging bullets. 

I'd like to dodge some bullets 

with you, Miss, I say.  

Missing you, I found I.