Approaching perfection

As a way to clear my mind and get myself properly thinking, cooking is really the only rival in my life to running. The methodical, repetitive nature of the work--combined with the division of attention that is forced by the number of necessarily simultaneous tasks--leads my mind to slowly cede active control over my movements. Whatever portion of my brain is assigned the task of not burning the garlic and onions while chopping the kale and keeping an eye on the broth seems to decouple from the part of my mind that is composed of sentences--and, lulled, I'm set free to think and write. (And then afterwards there are dishes to be washed, that most relaxing and contemplative of activities, which a poet friend once characterized as dealing with "finite objects in an infinite task.")

All this is by way of a preamble to a moment of synchronicity that occurred in my kitchen a while back. As I was prepping some vegetables, I glanced at a pot full of water on the verge of boiling. As I watched, a stream of tiny bubbles began to free themselves from the bottom of the pot and wend their way, with increasing speed, to the surface, where they broke exuberantly into nothingness. After I'd been watching for a few seconds I realized that the bubbles were rising and breaking in perfect time to the pleasantly formless electro-dance music that was playing on the stereo. With each beat, a bubble would burst, and as the almost reluctant off-beat took its turn, another bubble would set forth on its journey. The conjunction lasted a surprisingly long time, a seamless, mesmerizing melding of art and the accidents of the physical world.

As I watched, the unexpected perfection of the moment reminded me of a passage I heard Marilynne Robinson read at a writers' workshop in the summer of 1996. At that point, Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, was sixteen years behind her, and many readers wondered why she had not yet written a second novel, or whether she ever would do so. Though I had never quite understood the passion readers felt for Houskeeping--it's a memorable novel, but I find its narrative voice frequently unconvincing--as soon as Robinson began to read I was fully engaged, even enrapt, as if she were feeding words directly into my brain. It was an unforgettable experience, some of the best, most powerful writing I've ever encountered--yet at the same time I instantly understood why Robinson hadn't published anything for so many years. Such a definitive statement is of course absurdly presumptuous, but it really was what I thought at that moment: though she'd introduced the passage as being from a novel in progress, it was impossible to imagine what she read as forming any part of a sustained work.

And yet . . . it was just a passage about a bowl of blueberries. Freshly washed, resting in a cut glass bowl (or was it a colander?), they sat on a counter in the fading sun of late afternoon, the sun glimmering off the beads of water that clung to their purplish flesh. But Robinson described them so attentively, so luxuriantly, so--there's no other word for it--perfectly, that they became the most delectable, the most unforgettable, the most real blueberries imaginable. Even had they been present in the room, I'm not sure they could have been more obviously existing as a part of our universe. For those moments, the fineness of Robinson's attention made the very substance of the world seem divine.

It's possible that my memory of the passage is inaccurate in some way; it's also possible that Robinson also read about something beyond or aside from the blueberries. Regardless, the feeling of the shimmering reality she conjured up is still strongly resonant nearly a dozen years later.

Yet even as I was listening I thought--and still in some sense do think--that writing of that pitch of intensity would be utterly unsustainable over the course of a novel. For a reader and writer both, it would seem akin to running a marathon while holding to a pace appropriate for a 100-yard dash. When Gilead (which I do think is an exceptional novel) was published eight years later, it didn't contain that passage, and I wondered whether my instincts had been right. But what if they're not? What if I'm setting an artificial boundary on what can be done in art?

The thought brings to mind two of my favorite moments from John Ashbery's Three Poems. First, the temptation:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

Leaving it all out is seductive--and not just because it can sometimes be easier. Maybe some form of that temptation is driving my pessimism about the possibility of sustaining such intensely observed reality. But perhaps Robinson would seize on the counter that Ashbery offers later in the poem:

Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking it the same question
Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer
In words broken open and pressed to the mouth
And the last silence reveal the lining
Until at last this thing exist separately
At all levels of the landscape and in the sky
And in the people who timidly inhabit it

Ultimately I keep hoping I'm wrong--that Robinson's next novel, or a work by someone else entirely, will take me by the hand and show me that, yes, the world can be apprehended, and loved, at that level of detail, yet that the attention can still somehow be extended as well, be as accommodating and expansive as is allowed by the capacious form of the novel.

I know I've not forgotten the perfection I glimpsed in the passage Robinson read; my guess is that she hasn't either, and that she'll keep worrying at it and mulling it until what once really was impossible is suddenly real and alive and existing. As long as the world offers up beautiful moments, as long as the dancing bubbles occasionally surprise us by matching up with the beats, the real artists will keep trying.

In the realm of the Oneiroi

{Albrecht Durer, Traumgesicht (Dream Vision), 1525}

From Christopher Dewdney's Acquainted with the Night (2004):

Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process.

On the longest day of the year, it seems good to return, however haphazardly, to dreams; with the night losing, for now, its perpetual battle against the day, the powers of the Oneiroi, sons of Hypnos who serve as the rulers of dreaming, are surely at low ebb.

Besides, I'm going away for a few days to the country on a camping trip, and what better inducement to memorable dreams can there be than a night under stars and true, velvety darkness, the distractions of the city left behind?

From Three Poems (1972), by John Ashbery:

it needs pronouncing. To formulate oneself around this hollow, empty sphere . . . To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out. Then, quietly, it would be as objects placed along the top of a wall: a battery jar, a rusted pulley, shapeless wooden boxes, an open can of axle grease, two lengths of pipe. . . . We see this moment from outside as within. There is no need to offer proof.

I don't actually know whether dream plays a role in Ashbery's writing process, but so often his poetry bears that half-submerged, almost . . . swamp-like quality of a dream, slowed and perhaps logically inexplicable yet organic and right. Proust might argue that it doesn't matter whether dream consciously plays a part. Samuel Beckett explains, in his Proust (1931):

There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his "personality" has not disappeared with his fatigue.

Dream memory, however, necessarily diverges from real memory when we get to the area of prophetic or warning dreams. My favorite of those is a dream from our only known presidential dreamer, Lincoln, a dream so famous that it's simply known as Lincoln's Dream. It comes to us from Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon. In his Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 1847-1865 (1895) he relates that a few days before his assassination Lincoln told him the following:

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalgue on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Even understanding as I do the reasonable questions about the story's veracity--let alone about the purported significance of a man in constant danger dreaming about his death--the chills induced by that dream take me right back to my childhood self, awake in the dark, scared by nightmares. But from Richard N. Current's The Lincoln Nobody Knows (1958), I recently learned of another allegedly prophetic dream ascribed to Lincoln, this one noted by Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles in his diary:

It occurred on April 14, 1865. That morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, and the occasion was especially dignified by the presence of General Grant, fresh from his victory at Appomattox. The President was hoping for news from General Sherman in North Carolina, where a Confederate army still was in the field. To the Cabinet conferees Lincoln remarked that he had no doubt news soon would come and would be good. For, he said, he had had a dream the previous night. It was a dream he had in advance of almost every important event of the war--always the same dream. In it he "seemed to be moving in some singular, indescribable vessel," and he "was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore."

That night, Lincoln was shot.

I know I risk getting deep into the "And he had a secretary named Kennedy!"-style weeds here, but that dream, too, I find chilling. Yet whereas the first dream, when analyzed, seems a bit too pat, too perfect, this dream is the opposite: it spooks not so much because it seems prophetic as because it seems so vague--so deeply, utterly true to the texture of dream. I can feel the beat of the waves against the bow, see the wisps of cloud and fog obscuring the destination, imagine the odd patience that suffuses the lonely, quiet journey, the way the question of a final destination flits in and out of the dreamer's brain, strongly grasped one moment, lost and forgotten the next.

Imagine if Lincoln had been a lucid dreamer, like the Marquis Leon Hervey de Saint-Denys, who, as Christopher Dewdney explains in Acquainted with the Night, first brought lucid dreaming to widespread attention with his 1867 Dreams and How to Guide Them. Dewdney relates one of the Marquis' stories:

On coming out of a theater, I got into a hackney carriage, which moved off. I woke up almost immediately, without remembering this insignificant vision. I looked at the time on my watch. . . . and after having been completely awake for ten or fifteen minutes, I fell asleep again. It was here that the strange part of the dream began. I dreamed that I woke up in the carriage, which I remembered perfectly well having entered to go home (in the dream). I had the impression that I had dozed off for about a quarter of an hour, but without remembering what thoughts had passed through my mind during that time.

Surely the Oneiroi would be pleased to learn of the Marquis' confusion; at least they would know for sure which Marquis is dreaming and which Marquis is awake.

In looking up the Oneiroi, I learned that one of them, Phantasos, whose name means "apparition," appears in dreams as inanimate objects--which would help to explain those occasional dreams people have where ordinary, everyday items are infused with paralyzing horror. But I don't want to lead any readers to that sort of dream tonight, so I'll close with some more John Ashbery, a bit from Flow Chart (1991) wherein the vaguely ominous dream is held in abeyance:

But at times such as
These late ones, a moaning in copper beeches is heard, of regret,
not for what happened, or even for what could conceivably have happened, but
for what never happened and which therefore exists, as dark
and transparent as a dream. A dream from nowhere. A dream
with no place to go, all dressed up with no place to go, that an axe menaces, off and on, throughout eternity.

Sleep well. If you have good dreams, you might send them off to the proprietors of the Annandale Dream Gazette.