So I'm not thrilled about my last post. I think, mostly on account of it being sort of journalistic, an artificial structure that I am not familiar with and cannot really handle well. But reading over it has gotten me thinking about a few things.
I won't remove it, first of all, because I feel that part of the appeal of blog-writing is its spontaneity, its extemporaneous quality. Things enter the mind and are published almost as quickly. This is both wonderful and atrocious - my prose here is more energetic and varied than in any other context, at the serious expense of editing and revision. Everything is a trade off.
So I will keep it as sort of an awkward testament to the Spirit of Blog. But in another sense I find it quite interesting. I attempted, especially towards the end of it, to play around with language, to effect a kind of stylistic simulacrum of decay. I think I failed abominably, but that's beside the point.
Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the point that has me riled up, even minutely, is the sort of hack-neyed, ad hoc quality of the latter section. Using ellipsis to simulate ellision, broken spacing, omission of entire phrases to represent sections torn out or illegible. I mean, it has a very heavy-handed quality to it. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a damn about the piece, but what troubles me is the spirit behind it.
There's an amateurish approach to writing that seeks to elicit a particular response, be it comedic or emotional, without the use of subtletly or guile. The amateurish writer sits down and hammers out text with entire sections in bold face capitals, multiple exclamation marks, and abrupt caesuras. I shall attempt to demonstrate:
Judith SWERVED the car quickly away from the precipice!!! She was TOO LATE - the wheels spun out over the gorge and half the chassis began to GRIND into the - YAWNING PIT OF DEATH!!
Okay I'm obviously exaggerating here for effect. But imagine something along these lines, only toned down a bit in respect of its more superficial excesses. In all other respects, particularly in terms of grandiloquence, prolixity, verbosity, or whatever you want to call it, amateurish writing tries to grind and squeeze every drop of sentiment from the reader. There is no concern for style or grace, or the careful manipulation of context and language to produce a particular result.
Such writing is often called "masturbatory", a term I take quite seriously in that it has more than once been used to describe my own writing. What does it signify, aside from the obvious self-gratification? It is above all symptomatic of an author's profound and persistent disinterest in the reader - in his or her potential reactions or desires upon encountering your work. Naturally, it is patently impossible to tailor a written work to every possible taste; that is not my point, in the least. We must always write from our guts, from a point of interior strength and energy; we must always attempt to harness that fleeting, vaguely intuitive sensation of flow, beauty, artistry, and moment.
But there are times when we write exclusively for the pleasure that our own prose brings us. I have experienced the following phenomenon many, many times: I begin by writing something that I am convinced, just as the words grace the page, is pure gold. Don't be mistaken, I'm not confused by delusions of grandeur, but as I write I become nevertheless enthralled by my own use of language. However, as time progresses, and as the psychic distance between me and my own creation grows, deepens, widens, I become cold to it. Turns of phrase that I had previously considered brilliant become, well, increasingly mediocre. Average, tepid, stale, or worst of all - ineffectual.
The first moments of writing are the most self-serving and egoistic. The truly humble writer is one who can brave his (or her) own feeling of disgust at the garbage his fingers created, and return to the page again, and again, and again. Revision is the negation of ego. To create and then discard your work, heedless of quality, is little more than arrogance.
Yet, the whole situation is a bit more complex. That initial moment of ego, the narcissistic first-contact with the page, has in the past enabled me to overcome the horrible fear of failure that cripples all creative output. There is a huge danger associated with writing, and above all publishing. It is not at all surprising that so many writers become infuriated when their work is described as autobiographical. It is precisely this that I, as a writer, struggle to move away from. Writing is annihilation. What kind of power can someone have if they, in their creation, are always bounded to some essentialist, authorial self? The act of manipulating thought and language emerges from the ego, from whatever fractured and discursive "unity" of thought the mind can perceive itself as having. But for it to be of any merit, this art, it must separate itself severely from that point of origin, and delve so deeply into something foreign, even alien, that the point of contact between author and work is explosive and profoundly mystifying. The exposure of unity to difference is defined, in my mind, by mystery and wonder - and the best writing is precisely that which embraces the dissolution of stagnant forms.
In the end I need to find a productive harmony between my own persistent and inescapable ego. My vanity is absolute - there is no way to excise this self-serving element from an act of creation so intimately entangled with my own mind. What I can do, however, is struggle against the amateurish impulse to "just create", to hammer onto the page some brazen and childish thing - not in content, but in form, since I will always cherish the most immature of sentiments (laughter, absurdity, and irreverence). The best I can do, for now, is perhaps to take my own vain self-awareness - and all the ridiculous intensity of thought invested in the recognition of how wonderful I am, qua writer - and transform it into a meticulous self-awareness of the work of art. In simple terms: the less I think about myself, the more I can think about what I create.
And maybe, just maybe, in time I can find that precious space of wonder that is about neither the self, nor the art, but something more and deeper.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
True Journalism
Wouldn't it be fantastic to project ourselves into the future and retrospectively discover a post-apocalyptic newspaper article nestled in the obliterated remains of a once-magnificent city... an article like the following!
March 23, 2043
Giant Wolves Attack Park in Downtown Vancouver
by Naomi Blitzen
VANCOUVER - Three enormous wolves, each roughly half the size of a city block and about two stories tall, attacked a group of helpless parkgoers in Queen Elizabeth Park this morning. Twenty three people are reported dead, and at least another fourty-two were rushed to the nearby BC Children and Women's Hospital for immediate treatment. More than a dozen remain in critical condition.
The wolves appear to have been hiding in the Vandusen Botanical Garden, nearby to the west, and dashed into Queen Elizabeth Park at approximately 7:30am. Parkgoers were taken entirely by surprise, and most of the reported deceased belong to a Tai Chi group called Subtle Movements, which meets regularly on the south-western edge of the park.
"As soon as we saw these big [expletive deleted] wolves charging into the park - and I mean holy jesus they were roaring and snarling and I thought holy [expletive deleted] I'm going to die - well as soon as we saw them we just started running like all hell," reports one victim, Jim Basmuth, a superintendent in one of the nearby buildings. "Everyone just lost it and started screaming and tearing off and stepping over each other. I mean it was like total carnage."
The first four police officers to have arrived on the scene are also among the dead. "When officers Bartuzzi and Cannelli arrived there, they naturally began firing at the animals. I mean, we really don't have any training for this. They saw the giant wolves, and what are you supposed to do?" explained Police Constable Bernard Artaud at a press conference earlier this morning. "Of course, the wolves turned on them. They honestly didn't have a chance."
More officers arrived on the scene, and a perimeter was quickly set up around the park. Soon after, the military arrived with two tanks, several support helicopters, and a number of armored personnel carriers. According to numerous witness accounts, the wolves seemed entirely uninterested in the show of force around them. "They just sat down near each other and started, oh god, you know... munching," reported one witness. "The worst part," said another, ashen-faced, bystander, "was when they, jesus christ in heaven... when they started throwing the bodies in the air and, well, catching them."
The police and military perimeter was gradually tightened around the wolves. Large shock-transmitting weapons were mounted on trucks, for the purpose of stunning the enormous animals. Unfortunately, once the perimeter came to within 50 feet of the wolves, they began growling, stood to their feet, and simply bounded over the line of vehicles. Weapons fire from the military appears to have had no effect.
The wolves were last spotted heading down E 33rd Avenue towards the eastern edge of the city. The national guard has been contacted, and the entire city has been placed on high alert. A city-wide emergency bulletin was aired, urging all residents to remain indoors until the danger has been averted.
"I hate that I have to feel like a prisoner in my own home!" Complained Melissa Benins, who lives near the park where the incident ocurred. "I mean, how the hell did these wolves get into the city anyway?"
Officials believe the wolves swam in from Fraser river, to the south, and crept through the streets during the night. Driven by hunger, they attacked the first large cluster of people they found in the morning. Dr. Benjamin Wiscoff, a leading Caninologist at the University of British Columbia, commented that, "Wolves will not generally attack humans unless they are driven to it by severe hunger. It seems entirely reasonable that wolves of this size would have a very difficult time meeting their dietary needs, and so would be driven into the city sooner or later, out of necessity."
***************************
And another article -- scorched, frayed, ink faded, more recent yet worse for wear -- might reasonably be found underneath the twisted remains of an old newspaper dispenser. Its fragments could well read:
ay 14t , 043
Giant Wolves Continue to Plague Western Canada
by Betty Norbitz
VAN..OUV.R - Since the first attack many mon..s ago, so small by comparison to today's onslaught, the wolv..' numbers have continued to grow. Wolf sightings are a daily ocurrence, and attacks happen severa times a week. In Kelow a,
......... three hundred dead......................no reasonable expectation of retaliation
.......... small glimmer of hope ............. community pushed to the edge of despera.... ................. electrified a wolf water supply and brought one of th.. ..... down ..............
........................... much jubilation .................. .nfortunat.l.y, cut short, when the tow. hall .................. by an undetermine ....... of wolv.. .
More cynical observe.. ..............., "...... almost like ...... strange breed of wolf vengeance .........."
..S. Military forces ...... refuse ... offer assistance, owing to their own infestation of ...........
March 23, 2043
Giant Wolves Attack Park in Downtown Vancouver
by Naomi Blitzen
VANCOUVER - Three enormous wolves, each roughly half the size of a city block and about two stories tall, attacked a group of helpless parkgoers in Queen Elizabeth Park this morning. Twenty three people are reported dead, and at least another fourty-two were rushed to the nearby BC Children and Women's Hospital for immediate treatment. More than a dozen remain in critical condition.
The wolves appear to have been hiding in the Vandusen Botanical Garden, nearby to the west, and dashed into Queen Elizabeth Park at approximately 7:30am. Parkgoers were taken entirely by surprise, and most of the reported deceased belong to a Tai Chi group called Subtle Movements, which meets regularly on the south-western edge of the park.
"As soon as we saw these big [expletive deleted] wolves charging into the park - and I mean holy jesus they were roaring and snarling and I thought holy [expletive deleted] I'm going to die - well as soon as we saw them we just started running like all hell," reports one victim, Jim Basmuth, a superintendent in one of the nearby buildings. "Everyone just lost it and started screaming and tearing off and stepping over each other. I mean it was like total carnage."
The first four police officers to have arrived on the scene are also among the dead. "When officers Bartuzzi and Cannelli arrived there, they naturally began firing at the animals. I mean, we really don't have any training for this. They saw the giant wolves, and what are you supposed to do?" explained Police Constable Bernard Artaud at a press conference earlier this morning. "Of course, the wolves turned on them. They honestly didn't have a chance."
More officers arrived on the scene, and a perimeter was quickly set up around the park. Soon after, the military arrived with two tanks, several support helicopters, and a number of armored personnel carriers. According to numerous witness accounts, the wolves seemed entirely uninterested in the show of force around them. "They just sat down near each other and started, oh god, you know... munching," reported one witness. "The worst part," said another, ashen-faced, bystander, "was when they, jesus christ in heaven... when they started throwing the bodies in the air and, well, catching them."
The police and military perimeter was gradually tightened around the wolves. Large shock-transmitting weapons were mounted on trucks, for the purpose of stunning the enormous animals. Unfortunately, once the perimeter came to within 50 feet of the wolves, they began growling, stood to their feet, and simply bounded over the line of vehicles. Weapons fire from the military appears to have had no effect.
The wolves were last spotted heading down E 33rd Avenue towards the eastern edge of the city. The national guard has been contacted, and the entire city has been placed on high alert. A city-wide emergency bulletin was aired, urging all residents to remain indoors until the danger has been averted.
"I hate that I have to feel like a prisoner in my own home!" Complained Melissa Benins, who lives near the park where the incident ocurred. "I mean, how the hell did these wolves get into the city anyway?"
Officials believe the wolves swam in from Fraser river, to the south, and crept through the streets during the night. Driven by hunger, they attacked the first large cluster of people they found in the morning. Dr. Benjamin Wiscoff, a leading Caninologist at the University of British Columbia, commented that, "Wolves will not generally attack humans unless they are driven to it by severe hunger. It seems entirely reasonable that wolves of this size would have a very difficult time meeting their dietary needs, and so would be driven into the city sooner or later, out of necessity."
***************************
And another article -- scorched, frayed, ink faded, more recent yet worse for wear -- might reasonably be found underneath the twisted remains of an old newspaper dispenser. Its fragments could well read:
ay 14t , 043
Giant Wolves Continue to Plague Western Canada
by Betty Norbitz
VAN..OUV.R - Since the first attack many mon..s ago, so small by comparison to today's onslaught, the wolv..' numbers have continued to grow. Wolf sightings are a daily ocurrence, and attacks happen severa times a week. In Kelow a,
......... three hundred dead......................no reasonable expectation of retaliation
.......... small glimmer of hope ............. community pushed to the edge of despera.... ................. electrified a wolf water supply and brought one of th.. ..... down ..............
........................... much jubilation .................. .nfortunat.l.y, cut short, when the tow. hall .................. by an undetermine ....... of wolv.. .
More cynical observe.. ..............., "...... almost like ...... strange breed of wolf vengeance .........."
..S. Military forces ...... refuse ... offer assistance, owing to their own infestation of ...........
Sunday, March 11, 2007
What a Dream
Okay, so I pretty much just woke up after having the most amazing dream. It was a weird fusion of "Lost" and "Alice in Wonderland". It began with someone who looked remarkably like Hercules, from that live-action television show, knocking someone unconscious (which happens a lot in Lost), hurling them over a waterfall (and themselves bodily thereafter), crawling up the river bank onto the shore, hoisting the comatose body onto a shoulder, and tearing off into the jungle. Scene I!
And of course this was all supposed to be like the exciting and mysterious events happening to non-central yet nevertheless startlingly heroic characters somewhere else on the Island. (Aside: I write this energized from glorious dream-filled sleep, whilst listening to Berlioz' Dream of the Witches' Sabbath, which is so phenomenally appropriate to the impending contents of my dream that I am giddy with the awesome aesthetic wonderfulness of it all.)
So anyway, Hercules and captive, and quite possibly other runners-along (whose faces and identities remain somewhat ambiguous, but were undoubtedly heroic), find some kind of burrow with magical properties and dive headfirst into it. These people did everything with gusto! Anyhow, after diving underground, they become prisoners of some weird Cabbalistic underworld community with a strange ice queen. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I do recall stalactites, corridors, and frenetic dancing.
Okay, so anyway, cut to other characters. Scene II. These were children. I think a boy and girl of like 12 or 14 (which is where the dream became very Alice in Wonderlandish). Oh yeah, and there was a talking bushy white dog, with tremendous sagacity that the above children invariably ignored.
But the dream wasn't from their perspective per se. I think it sort of passed by them in third person, and then became first person, whereupon I, myself, became the hero. This was the really cool part. But anyway, I'll get to that.
So these kids are like wandering around this forest or swamp or field, the details aren't really clear, and they happen upon this crystalline tent structure, and of course step inside it. There's a throne sitting there, in the middle of this room, and the room is conjoined to another room by a constricting pink spiderweb-like mesh, that only small mole-like creatures can pass through, and they can only pass through it because they are carrying beautiful purple-pink flowers that, with that special breed of dream-omniscience, I knew were intoxicating and particularly special. And so, as the moles went to and fro through the mesh, the fibres would tremble and constrict and stuff, widening to let them by.
So, moving on, the kids are in this room, and are looking around and stuff. Then the aforementioned ice princess steps in and starts talking to them. About wonders, and duty, and how there is an exciting life for them through the tunnel. The kids get weirded out, but are of course naturally curious, and start to approach the tunnel. The unerringly sagacious dog steps in and says, "No, let me examine it first. It may not be safe." Which he tries to do, and is instantly snatched up by the weird mesh and transported to some strange subterannean prison, no doubt to be tortured and tickled into a hapless state of merely faithful, not sagacious, dog-servitude. The children, quite understandably, totally fucking flip out and make a dash for the exit, which is instantly blocked by a cloudy gossamer fabric, which is in fact only superficially gossamer and really quite strong on the microscopic, uber-magical, fibrous level. And it expands to fill the little gaps to the side and below, when the children try to squeeze around it.
And then, strangely enough, Hercules appears behind the mesh and starts pounding on it, to no avail. Much hysteria, much sobbing, and then end of scene.
Cut to ME! This is the cool part! So I'm in this weird maze of rooms and corridors, all underground, all dark and dank, all very seriously dangerous and potentially ready to FUCK YOU UP in horribly creepy and disturbing ways. Like, there were these teenagers, different people than the aforementioned kids (I think, if I wanted to make a plausible back-story, other hapless young travellers-about who fell into the Ice-Queen's trap and have wandered her black and heartless domain for many years, longing for home), who passed by these mirrors and were helplessly drawn towards them. They passed through them, only to step right back out... but always aged, different, sadder, frightened, a little bit closer to death. And always unable to mention what happened behind the mirror, or how long they had been there. And, perhaps strangest, was that the other people, after walking a bit and comforting their rejoined companion, would always step into another mirror a little further along, heedless of the obvious horrible fate that awaited them on the other side. What I loved about this dream, though, is how minimalist it was. I've had dreams like this in the past, but only like a fragment of the coolness, and instead of two or three people drawn into mirrors, it would be an infinite column of helpless souls, for whatever reason -- and this always precipitated a tired dream-nausea, the kind where you just get sick of the sheer endless mind-crunching repetition of the one particular dream-aspect that your brain has fixated on. Not so in this dream... it kept changing, one wondrous thing to the next!
Okay, so I wander through some more rooms, which frankly have kind of blurred and been forgotten (I am amazed I remember as much as I do), when I find myself in this long corridor. It's very narrow, and there are thick metallic doors with spikes and skull-holes and pointing things and leather straps and all manner of creepy looking materials. They practically SCREAM do not enter. I walk the length of the hall, and notice there are like six doors. Exactly six. I get to the end and there's a plaque on the wall that reads, quite clearly, "There is only one door that leads from this room." I was like, "Shit." Which one? They all look so evil! So I walk back a bit, thinking, "Fuck, this must be like some horrific nightmarish version of the Price is Right, and I gotta choose the right demonic door, or die." But then I think, no way man, that shit's for morons. I see a little panel between two of the skull doors, right in the middle of the room, and it seems slightly loose at the base, as if pulling away from the wall - so I kick it! Sure enough, it opens, revealing another corridor! YES!!!
I run through, and I swear to god I'm thinking to myself, "Man, I'm smarter than the average bear!" So this corridor runs about 15 feet before widening into a little rectangular alcove, and who do I meet there? MOTHER FUCKING DERRIDA! Only it's not true life-size Derrida, but a short gnome-ish replacement Derrida with the amazing mass of white hair and a tiny notepad. He is scribbling frantically on his notepad, and I'm thinking, "Holy shit, this dream is amazing, it has Derrida." So I stoop down and start talking to him, and of course he's clearly a nutter, and is writing out the letters of his name, which actually spelled something weird and vaguely Czech, like Huertek Seuzok, which frankly did not conflict at all with his being Derrida, and he was conducting some intense numerology on the letters of the name, whereby he added up all the alphabetical numbers corresponding to each letter, which produced something insanely beautiful or weird or inexplicable, and of course I kind of lost the thread of what he was going on about and kept wandering. But holy shit!
So then, honestly, my dream had this amazing cinematic brilliance to it. It CUT, like CHANGE SCENE, and I swear to god it switches to this image of a little garden in a field, with forest in the distance, and everything is obscured by this thick wavy hazy blue, as if there's like a dome of translucent energy hovering above me, or maybe it's because I'm inside the head of an encephalopod, but in any case the blue is really beautiful and surreal like this Japanese photo I once saw of tall spruce trees in winter, seen through a colour-filter. And it gets weirder! There are these little root-shaped holes in the soil, with rooty tendrils writhing above them, scattered all over the garden... and this army of carrots in the distance is charging and bounding towards the waiting tendrils, and they JUMP IN, and the perspective switches a bit to half-above, half-below ground, and I get to see the roots writhe up and into the carrots and then some rabbits or moles or whatever crawling up through the earth to snatch them, presumably for dinner.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS.
Next scene: Dinner with strange, highly cultured, talking underground mammals! I am here in this beautifully ornate, lavish, GORGEOUS dining room, with a stunning silky table-cloth spread over a massive dark rich mahogany table, cabrioled legs with swirly densely carved patterns, and magnificent plates with shimmering designs. And my mouth is watering, because I know I'm here for dinner (oh yeah, and I need not mention that the end of the dining table vanishes into darkness... along with the fully illuminated room, which has walls, furniture, pictures.. it all just disappears into nothingness). So I'm just about to sit down and enjoy what will no-doubt be a splendid meal, shared with my rabbit-person friends, when one of them stops me and points to a picture on the wall, which is a picture of his family - all animals of some kind - enjoying their meal around this table. I instantly understand, though am a bit hurt: no people allowed at the rabbit dinner table. I feel a little sad, but they very kindly usher me into a smaller room with a much less ornate table. They join me for dinner, and the patriarch or top-bunny sits at the head, and starts telling me about some of the food, as I pick it up.
So I get these plastic tube-like things... I mean I think they were plastic, but maybe they were alabaster. I'm a little puzzled by them, but then I understand that they contain pure oyster flesh, which I suck down without much hesitation. A bit salty but otherwise good. I think I did vaguely recall being vegetarian, but I didn't want to offend my guests by refusing food.
Oh yeah, I forgot, right before being seated one of the rabbit-women tells me they're having breakfast... but I know for some reason that the time is 9:30pm. Which doesn't seem to bother them at all. So I ask them what they eat when they wake up, and this really throws them for a loop - so I sort of back off from the subject, not wanting to upset them.
Okay, back to the table and meal! What a wondrous feast! They brought out this platter of what looks like these kind of spade-shaped pastries, kind of dark, almost black in places, a bit lighter in others. Splotchy colour distribution, but with a nice floury texture. I grab one and start eating, and it's delicious! It's got a very subdued sweetness, kind of like Pain Sucré, but only more doughy and just overall tastier. Kind of dense but not overly filling. They informed me that they were called Sukroses, and they only served them at awkward or unpleasant dinners. I nodded happily, not seeming to care that this very probably referred to me.
There was another dish of similar looking pastries, only a bit larger and flatter, which were savory. They tasted a lot like baked Thyme pastry might taste... very delicious, but not sweet at all. I preferred the sweet ones, and took another.
And then I noticed the tablecloth. It had these complicated spiral patterns that were like holes in the cloth, but probably weren't in fact holes because, really, they covered the entire cloth and that would seriously disturb the structural integrity of the fabric, and plus they had this beautiful mosaic quality... very multi-colored and intertwining.
So the patriarch-bunny is standing across from me and smiling jovially. He says that I should trace my sensation into the fabric, and I do this while sucking down another oyster. Sure enough a little pattern traces itself into the cloth, imbued with my emotions and memory of the recent experience. He then explains that it takes them several hours to re-experience all the patterns, but I should try one! So, of course, I run my finger through one... it's really intricate and the pattern is a bit hard to follow, but gives me this really refreshing kind of water-swimming vibe.
And then I wake up! What a wonderful dream.
And of course this was all supposed to be like the exciting and mysterious events happening to non-central yet nevertheless startlingly heroic characters somewhere else on the Island. (Aside: I write this energized from glorious dream-filled sleep, whilst listening to Berlioz' Dream of the Witches' Sabbath, which is so phenomenally appropriate to the impending contents of my dream that I am giddy with the awesome aesthetic wonderfulness of it all.)
So anyway, Hercules and captive, and quite possibly other runners-along (whose faces and identities remain somewhat ambiguous, but were undoubtedly heroic), find some kind of burrow with magical properties and dive headfirst into it. These people did everything with gusto! Anyhow, after diving underground, they become prisoners of some weird Cabbalistic underworld community with a strange ice queen. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I do recall stalactites, corridors, and frenetic dancing.
Okay, so anyway, cut to other characters. Scene II. These were children. I think a boy and girl of like 12 or 14 (which is where the dream became very Alice in Wonderlandish). Oh yeah, and there was a talking bushy white dog, with tremendous sagacity that the above children invariably ignored.
But the dream wasn't from their perspective per se. I think it sort of passed by them in third person, and then became first person, whereupon I, myself, became the hero. This was the really cool part. But anyway, I'll get to that.
So these kids are like wandering around this forest or swamp or field, the details aren't really clear, and they happen upon this crystalline tent structure, and of course step inside it. There's a throne sitting there, in the middle of this room, and the room is conjoined to another room by a constricting pink spiderweb-like mesh, that only small mole-like creatures can pass through, and they can only pass through it because they are carrying beautiful purple-pink flowers that, with that special breed of dream-omniscience, I knew were intoxicating and particularly special. And so, as the moles went to and fro through the mesh, the fibres would tremble and constrict and stuff, widening to let them by.
So, moving on, the kids are in this room, and are looking around and stuff. Then the aforementioned ice princess steps in and starts talking to them. About wonders, and duty, and how there is an exciting life for them through the tunnel. The kids get weirded out, but are of course naturally curious, and start to approach the tunnel. The unerringly sagacious dog steps in and says, "No, let me examine it first. It may not be safe." Which he tries to do, and is instantly snatched up by the weird mesh and transported to some strange subterannean prison, no doubt to be tortured and tickled into a hapless state of merely faithful, not sagacious, dog-servitude. The children, quite understandably, totally fucking flip out and make a dash for the exit, which is instantly blocked by a cloudy gossamer fabric, which is in fact only superficially gossamer and really quite strong on the microscopic, uber-magical, fibrous level. And it expands to fill the little gaps to the side and below, when the children try to squeeze around it.
And then, strangely enough, Hercules appears behind the mesh and starts pounding on it, to no avail. Much hysteria, much sobbing, and then end of scene.
Cut to ME! This is the cool part! So I'm in this weird maze of rooms and corridors, all underground, all dark and dank, all very seriously dangerous and potentially ready to FUCK YOU UP in horribly creepy and disturbing ways. Like, there were these teenagers, different people than the aforementioned kids (I think, if I wanted to make a plausible back-story, other hapless young travellers-about who fell into the Ice-Queen's trap and have wandered her black and heartless domain for many years, longing for home), who passed by these mirrors and were helplessly drawn towards them. They passed through them, only to step right back out... but always aged, different, sadder, frightened, a little bit closer to death. And always unable to mention what happened behind the mirror, or how long they had been there. And, perhaps strangest, was that the other people, after walking a bit and comforting their rejoined companion, would always step into another mirror a little further along, heedless of the obvious horrible fate that awaited them on the other side. What I loved about this dream, though, is how minimalist it was. I've had dreams like this in the past, but only like a fragment of the coolness, and instead of two or three people drawn into mirrors, it would be an infinite column of helpless souls, for whatever reason -- and this always precipitated a tired dream-nausea, the kind where you just get sick of the sheer endless mind-crunching repetition of the one particular dream-aspect that your brain has fixated on. Not so in this dream... it kept changing, one wondrous thing to the next!
Okay, so I wander through some more rooms, which frankly have kind of blurred and been forgotten (I am amazed I remember as much as I do), when I find myself in this long corridor. It's very narrow, and there are thick metallic doors with spikes and skull-holes and pointing things and leather straps and all manner of creepy looking materials. They practically SCREAM do not enter. I walk the length of the hall, and notice there are like six doors. Exactly six. I get to the end and there's a plaque on the wall that reads, quite clearly, "There is only one door that leads from this room." I was like, "Shit." Which one? They all look so evil! So I walk back a bit, thinking, "Fuck, this must be like some horrific nightmarish version of the Price is Right, and I gotta choose the right demonic door, or die." But then I think, no way man, that shit's for morons. I see a little panel between two of the skull doors, right in the middle of the room, and it seems slightly loose at the base, as if pulling away from the wall - so I kick it! Sure enough, it opens, revealing another corridor! YES!!!
I run through, and I swear to god I'm thinking to myself, "Man, I'm smarter than the average bear!" So this corridor runs about 15 feet before widening into a little rectangular alcove, and who do I meet there? MOTHER FUCKING DERRIDA! Only it's not true life-size Derrida, but a short gnome-ish replacement Derrida with the amazing mass of white hair and a tiny notepad. He is scribbling frantically on his notepad, and I'm thinking, "Holy shit, this dream is amazing, it has Derrida." So I stoop down and start talking to him, and of course he's clearly a nutter, and is writing out the letters of his name, which actually spelled something weird and vaguely Czech, like Huertek Seuzok, which frankly did not conflict at all with his being Derrida, and he was conducting some intense numerology on the letters of the name, whereby he added up all the alphabetical numbers corresponding to each letter, which produced something insanely beautiful or weird or inexplicable, and of course I kind of lost the thread of what he was going on about and kept wandering. But holy shit!
So then, honestly, my dream had this amazing cinematic brilliance to it. It CUT, like CHANGE SCENE, and I swear to god it switches to this image of a little garden in a field, with forest in the distance, and everything is obscured by this thick wavy hazy blue, as if there's like a dome of translucent energy hovering above me, or maybe it's because I'm inside the head of an encephalopod, but in any case the blue is really beautiful and surreal like this Japanese photo I once saw of tall spruce trees in winter, seen through a colour-filter. And it gets weirder! There are these little root-shaped holes in the soil, with rooty tendrils writhing above them, scattered all over the garden... and this army of carrots in the distance is charging and bounding towards the waiting tendrils, and they JUMP IN, and the perspective switches a bit to half-above, half-below ground, and I get to see the roots writhe up and into the carrots and then some rabbits or moles or whatever crawling up through the earth to snatch them, presumably for dinner.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS.
Next scene: Dinner with strange, highly cultured, talking underground mammals! I am here in this beautifully ornate, lavish, GORGEOUS dining room, with a stunning silky table-cloth spread over a massive dark rich mahogany table, cabrioled legs with swirly densely carved patterns, and magnificent plates with shimmering designs. And my mouth is watering, because I know I'm here for dinner (oh yeah, and I need not mention that the end of the dining table vanishes into darkness... along with the fully illuminated room, which has walls, furniture, pictures.. it all just disappears into nothingness). So I'm just about to sit down and enjoy what will no-doubt be a splendid meal, shared with my rabbit-person friends, when one of them stops me and points to a picture on the wall, which is a picture of his family - all animals of some kind - enjoying their meal around this table. I instantly understand, though am a bit hurt: no people allowed at the rabbit dinner table. I feel a little sad, but they very kindly usher me into a smaller room with a much less ornate table. They join me for dinner, and the patriarch or top-bunny sits at the head, and starts telling me about some of the food, as I pick it up.
So I get these plastic tube-like things... I mean I think they were plastic, but maybe they were alabaster. I'm a little puzzled by them, but then I understand that they contain pure oyster flesh, which I suck down without much hesitation. A bit salty but otherwise good. I think I did vaguely recall being vegetarian, but I didn't want to offend my guests by refusing food.
Oh yeah, I forgot, right before being seated one of the rabbit-women tells me they're having breakfast... but I know for some reason that the time is 9:30pm. Which doesn't seem to bother them at all. So I ask them what they eat when they wake up, and this really throws them for a loop - so I sort of back off from the subject, not wanting to upset them.
Okay, back to the table and meal! What a wondrous feast! They brought out this platter of what looks like these kind of spade-shaped pastries, kind of dark, almost black in places, a bit lighter in others. Splotchy colour distribution, but with a nice floury texture. I grab one and start eating, and it's delicious! It's got a very subdued sweetness, kind of like Pain Sucré, but only more doughy and just overall tastier. Kind of dense but not overly filling. They informed me that they were called Sukroses, and they only served them at awkward or unpleasant dinners. I nodded happily, not seeming to care that this very probably referred to me.
There was another dish of similar looking pastries, only a bit larger and flatter, which were savory. They tasted a lot like baked Thyme pastry might taste... very delicious, but not sweet at all. I preferred the sweet ones, and took another.
And then I noticed the tablecloth. It had these complicated spiral patterns that were like holes in the cloth, but probably weren't in fact holes because, really, they covered the entire cloth and that would seriously disturb the structural integrity of the fabric, and plus they had this beautiful mosaic quality... very multi-colored and intertwining.
So the patriarch-bunny is standing across from me and smiling jovially. He says that I should trace my sensation into the fabric, and I do this while sucking down another oyster. Sure enough a little pattern traces itself into the cloth, imbued with my emotions and memory of the recent experience. He then explains that it takes them several hours to re-experience all the patterns, but I should try one! So, of course, I run my finger through one... it's really intricate and the pattern is a bit hard to follow, but gives me this really refreshing kind of water-swimming vibe.
And then I wake up! What a wonderful dream.
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