As If by Blau Herbert;

Author:Blau, Herbert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

SIX

Revising the Dream

A DISCIPLINE OF DISTRUST

Journal entry: “I dreamt again that there was trouble at the theater and that Buddy had to ‘protect’ me.” That may not have been the nightmare from which I wanted to wake up sweating, but with some distressing truth it came after what I'd written, with familiar redundancy, about my brain being stressed, taut, and tormented all the more by a pledge I'd made to myself, “to understand my motives as they really are.” I insisted I was doing this for the first time in my life, which seems, looking back, a portentous surprise, since if I could count on nothing else I'd always thought I was doing that, with an embarrassing excess that the journals really confirm. Or my letters to Bea, which she saved, and which Dick, arranging her papers after she died, sent back to me recently. The usual pattern is there, motives shaped by moods, especially in those conflicted years, about the time of that dream. I was ebullient one day, depressing the next, as Bea knew well enough, or searching, searching, for I wasn't quite sure what, with “faith enough yet,” as I wrote her, “to know that tension is still part of the natural order of things and may itself be fruitful.” But what was I looking for? “Wouldn't it be an impossible life if the only thing you could estimate as real remained for always inaccessible. Do you follow me?” I asked. “I don't mean to be ostentatiously pessimistic—this is a literal statement of the fact of my feelings at the moment, part of which goes against what I know I believe.”

What I was saying to Bea still feels, just that, substantial fact, but I'm no more sure what to make of it. If there was anything ostentatious, that had less to do with the pessimism than the philosophical terms, like “being and becoming,” that Bea hardly needed, whatever the order of things, though even those terms were, in the reality coming upon me, beginning to acquire substance, the abstractions coming to life—if also a little beyond me, making their way in the world. “Excuse me, my sweet,” I wrote, “I guess I have been trying in this letter to explain myself to myself; and you are the best ear I have.” The explaining still continues, but as to what my motives really are, of course I'm still guessing—and will, no doubt, until I cease to be. To dwell on that, sure, in my eighty-third year to heaven, but why in the long ago were thoughts of my own dying so active in the becoming, and no mere feelings, but existential fact, its happening, but unseen, which was very soon inseparable from how I thought of theater, or what past all appearance I was seeing there.

About that seeing, my wife Kathy is disinclined. She also has a good ear, with a normally irrepressible, most salient good nature, but when I'm talking about what's there, inarguably there, the dying in front of your eyes, she's really quite distressed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.