I am stranded on the farm, as my little car exploded, an alarm bell which I had never heard before going off as the gauge to the thermometer tilted higher than I had ever seen. Procrastinating doing anything about it, as I am reluctant to go into hock without areal destination, having folded up my studio in a complex which was much like an insane asylum last week. It represents the end of the most intensive work-jag of the last decade, one in which I finished thirty eight paintingsin sixteen months
Now I keep to my admittedly rather peculiarly luxurious digs, experimenting with a new mode of being marginal, revising old verses and postponing what to paint next until... until some shift in my soul allows me to alter my palette, which has begun to seem a trap, until I figure out where this new body of work should go. The luxury of my domain consists of 4,000 volumes and many,many records, as well as a collection of artifacts which has caused more than one guest to reflect on the house-hold resemblance to a museum. How did it come to this, that I have acquired so much, who used to live as a nomad?
I sleep too much but I am re-acquiring a dream life that was once as rich and episodic as as a Thousand and One Nights, but has--until recently--almost ceased to exist. I dreamt I was a sparrow who tweaked the eagle with his wit. I woke at 3:am from a long surveillance of my hither-to unknown residence in an unknown town. 5 am found me engaging the long dead in an animated discussion. And so forth, so that to sleep was like turning a dial and arriving at yet another time and place. Odd, as if I had taunted fate or the mechanism of contraiety, as I had been wondering over the abscence of dreams, contrasting it with my time with the Helvetti-Jerrahi dervishes during which dreams seemed to overflow into daily life.
MAHLER
Why did I dream of Gustav Mahler among the dervishes? A question I may pose to Nur in the next life, as we wait for an audience with the prophets. I dreamed I was sent by God to help Mahler finish the fourth symphony. The dream is still a vivid memory, and here I will write it down. In this dream, as in its several sisters, I do not actually see God--who is very large--but sit on what appears to be a huge hand. Nor am I as I am in this life. Instead I appear to be a spinning diamond. I whirl and pipe impertinent questions until I am putin a pocket of his robe. The locale is the heavenly library, which is like a gentlemen's club in London or the Century Club in New York. Flaming seraphs which are oddly domesticated re-arrange books on the shelves. Mythological subject matter on the walls. Comfy chairs. But Mahler in Vienna has the composer equivalent to writer's block and I am sent to his side-street dwelling, invisible to all but God, to prompt him to finish the work.
The Mahler fourth, as you may recall, begins with sleigh-bells, thanks to my device of rattling them outside his window, and the scherzo is due to slipping a little cognac in the cat-food, causing his Katz to get drunk; the skittish behaviour which ensues is the inspiration for the violin dans macabre of the second movement.And so forth. And suddenly, as he puts the last note of the final movement to paper--which describes the childrens' games in heaven--I am transposed to heaven again, where there is a huge fete--genii and asparas with colored umbrellas, Mozart on roller-skates, and beyond that the Bride of Heaven, who is the voice of the last movement of the Mahler fourth, and for whom God has been longing. More than that, it seems--at least from this dream, whose numinous qualities even now makes me unaccountably happy though it occurred twenty years ago--that when a true vision is brought to earth it extends the boundaries of heaven, and returns eternity to itself. Or so it appeared in the dream, that the true purpose of art is to extend the boundaries of heaven. (In fact, the final movement of the Mahler fourth was filched from the third symphony, and I believe was the first movement to have been written of this great work. But the truth of a dream is different from the truth of fact).
July12