a strong smell of turpentine

For the lucid-dreaming investigators among the readership, I must post this particular thread of last night’s dreams: A particular four-word sentence, spoken at a resonant moment, struck me as one I wanted to remember because the arrangement of vowels and consonants was so pretty. I spent the rest of the night repeating it to myself at intervals to make certain I hadn’t forgotten it, reminding myself of the many times such phrases would fade at the very moment of awakening. At one point I wrote it on the back of an envelope and allowed myself to begin writing a related line of verse, then told myself, “Well, this isn’t doing any good, because I’m still asleep so this envelope won’t be there when I wake up. There’s no use in going any further with this.” And in fact I then woke up for a few minutes, ran through that part of the dream for a while, realized I was still too tired to move, fell asleep again for a bit, and as I expected, was able to remember the four-word phrase successfully (including the ambiguity of whether it had morphed earlier in the night from something predictable to the slightly unexpected variant) and the rhythm of the line I had begun to write on the envelope, but not the line of verse itself.

The four-word sentence does sound nice but is no great shakes on any other level. If I may quote William James’ revelation regarding the ultimate secret of the universe, “A strong smell of turpentine pervades throughout.”

I shall not quote the sentence from my dream because no matter what it said, the armchair Freudians would make great sport of it. And if they didn’t, utopyr would.

news from shambhala, or shambling towards north decatur

You may have missed the news story that the Dalai Lama has accepted a professorship at Emory University. This means that Salman Rushdie and the Dalai Lama are now on the same university faculty.

Since both are distinguished visiting scholars, this means they will be spending, at most, a very few days in Atlanta (and never at the same time, unfortunately). But the Dalai Lama will actually be instructing Emory students who travel to the city in India where the Dalai Lama has his residence. (Having tried to remember the spelling without looking it up, I’ve decided to leave the reference at that.)

The Dalai Lama’s specific coursework will be devoted to discovering ways to resolve the violent conflicts among contending versions of religion.

If this plot line were dropped into a novel by Thomas Pynchon or John Crowley, it would be regarded as a master stroke of fantasy.

Of course, if the Tibetan Buddhists are right, it already is a master stroke of fantasy. We just haven’t noticed that we are living in the fantasy novel that we ourselves are creating.

third time's the curse (from LJ friends, not from the universe)

Three posts in one morning is too many, but I was trying to find a very early post of mine and was surprised to realize I hadn't looked for months at a blog that I myself had warmly recommended. I have quoted, many times, Father Sogol's remark in Mount Analogue that we forget the beginnings of long chains of causations and thus fall into grotesque error; I have just now recalled, too, a passage in The Forbidden Forest in which Stefan Viziru remarks that he has the sense that human beings have forgotten something that they once knew that is essential to their well-being, and how could such a thing be possible?

Well, easy.

Anyway, the historical botanical and allegorical illustrations that Giornale Nuovo locates are totally flabbergasting, and should be looked at forthwith by anyone with an interest in such things (I once again exempt John Crowley, who spent twenty years writing himself out of authorial bondage to such historical epochs):

http://www.spamula.net/blog/about.html

*Okay, so I originally forgot to note that the current post on Giornale Nuovo is the nuovo-stile dreamlike dominatrix fantasias of Bruno Schulz, but since those are well known to anybody who has read twentieth century Central European literature, or fantasy and sci fi for that matter (who doesn't know Street of Crocodiles ?), I figured they wouldn't shock anybody. The previous posts are true obscurities and revelations.

One wonders if Schulz's novel The Messiah will ever turn up; its mysterious absence has generated some excellent fantasies by other writers.