Definitely Not Lemmings #23

I'm pleased to welcome Paul Martin as another Definitely Not Lemmings; Paul's well-written and intelligent posts focusing on but not limited to teaching and education can be found here.

Bang, Bang—You're Dead

Some claim

The sacred realm of poetry
As their sole rightful hunting ground,

And never miss the chance to kill
Whatever presumptuous poacher encroaches.

Fugitive Dream Sequence with Exaggerated Figures of Speech, Take 2002

A dream unfolding with scenes of what could be England or the US West Coast.

Three of us have stopped at a dipstick village where the fattest begins a kind of St. Vitus dance outside a knife-like Freudian slit of a shop—I’m suddenly inside under numberless dangling shoelaces of every size, color and description modifying a low ceiling defying description. Dark as an earthworm’s diggings. Fatso’s squirming on the sidewalk like Gregor Samsa in later larval stage so we cannonball him to the nearest hospital. On the road we’re driving through utterly beautiful vistas—paramount visions of the Pacific Northwest circa 1950s? And then gunning it over a long stretch of water—flashing blue silver-white and a floating bridge just below the surface. Odd—the people are swimming on the bridge, craning their popped-up heads just above the water as we lop them off with brio, aplomb and pizazz.

Cut to hospital where we’re told our friend has apoplexy– no surprise—something we had garnered before— (how had we gathered this?) and as we say goodbye, I see he’s trying to use this contraption to feed himself—resembles a gangly pair of claws reminiscent of Hawking—but he’s too clumsy to manipulate it properly, and as I’m leaving I notice apricot pits lying surreptitiously in the folds of his sheets.

It continues until I’m suddenly alone in a train station wanting to buy a ticket to London. Now, an actor in the dream, not an audience. The station’s bloated like a jumbo can of gone-off solid-packed John West tuna. After browsing some faux bijoux at a newsstand surrounded by grotesque, mall-crazed Japanese tourists trotting round looking like sushi addicts who’ve just quit cold turkey, I go to a ticket stall where a woman primly coiffured à la Dorothy Lamour tells me London tickets are issued at such-and-such a location at such-and-such a time but she garbles the information like Garbo and she doesn’t say she’s the one who’ll be doing the selling when the time comes. When the time does come and the loudspeaker plays it to see just how Sammy runs, everyone runs to the stall like diarrhetic buffalos pummeling the riders of the purple sage into pemmican—to the woman I’d spoken to before! We’re pushing and being pushed as if our lives depended on it, till a dapper railroad official with a dainty cowlick stands up behind the ticket stall and asks us all to please step back on the platform and please lie down so as not to be seen by the woman! This annunciation strikes us dumb, but we drop flat on our stomachs while he tells us ad infinitum that buying tickets should be a matter of style—un élan vital—until I say “Sure, but shouldn’t style be as goose-pimpling as coprolagnia? This is just plain shit”—and walk away.

Then, shots of a man (is it me?) running away from Mr. X—(the offended official?) (Dr. Richard Kimble?)—each subsequent scene another chapter of the man’s life. At some stage in the middle, he senses it’s the railway official—always a presence behind him, always running scared, always looking back. But neither the man who’s doing the chasing nor the man being chased is seen— as if filming a cornucopian stream-of-consciousness interior monologue from As I Lay Lying in Yoknapatawpha County By Bill Clinton As Told To William Faulkner. Finally, the by now much older man comes to an ivy-choked country mansion where elegantly dressed people reeking of fin de siècle are loitering on the lawn conversing à la Henry James and playing sundry card games and he offers to be a dealer in one. He perches on a three-legged stool sans seat and a young woman sits primly on his lap. When she leaves, he starts speaking (so far, he has only gesticulated), saying he’s come as far as he’s fated to go and he’s going to stop. Still spraying saliva-larded syllables, he sits on the lawn, shuts his eyes and waits for the end. Like gadflies drawn to freshly catapulted cow pies, hordes of onlookers have now congregated round him and are commenting on this fact—some curiously, others ironically.

Now spreadeagled on his back, somewhat like the da Vinci drawing many have seen but few know the name of, the old man sputters to a stop— and now I see what he’s seeing: The blackness descends in folds like hot fudge over Mt. Fujiyama and the faces and voices coagulate and slowly melt until a vatic sounding voice strangely reminiscent of Francis the Talking Mule brazenly announces the man’s life or the dream we’ve just witnessed is akin to an iconoclastic Marguerite Duras New Wave screenplay with the curious title: Hiroshima mon amour, the end of history,
you hypocrite dreamer!—mon semblable,—mon frère!

NB: Dreamt in 2002, this sequence has since gone through a number of minor revisions but without major changes to its images.

Echoes of a Third Man

twinned in search
of a voice

one

shut in-
side,

an other
other out-

side, you decide.

Poet, I've Been Meaning

But I’ve also been
Other things before

You came along
And shall be other

Things after you leave
That I can tell you about

If you’re interested,
All you have to do is help me

Invoke the right metaphor.

Life Studies

I wonder what Robert Lowell would have said about this foraging self-sufficient hunchback female dwarf?

The Causal Connection

That

Someone casually discovered
The missing link

Had always been missing, now
That was something

Everyone had cause
To miss.