The Trap of What Never (Might Have) Happened

[Image: “10th July 2008 – The Dream Diary,” by user practicalowl on Flickr.com. (Right-click and view in a new window/tab for a much larger version.)) Used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother’s belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I’m going with them.
And it’s too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.

for Louis Oliver

(Joy Harjo [source])

…and:

Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory? What if this new world isn’t new at all but a memory of a new world?

What if we really do keep making the same mistakes again and again, never remembering the lessons to learn but never forgetting either that it had been different, that there was a pristine place?

Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

Birthday
(excerpt)

I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands,
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss
on the mouth of that new born river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.

(Andrea Gibson [source])

…and:

Shuttered Windows

To speak of the smell and feel
of books, the erotics of the text,
has begun to sound perverse

One by one, the old places of worship
churches, bookstores, Nature herself
become quaint and are vacated

In their stead a gleaming, ambitious screen
part shuttered window, part distorting mirror
full of wandering, restless spirits

Like so many ghosts in limbo —
free of the tyranny of bodies,
yet aching for their phantom limbs.

(Yahia Lababidi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Stranger

You wake before dawn beside someone
you don’t recognize, a dark woman who snores
from her belly as though she were churning inside.
It alarms you at first, though you’re drawn
to the shape of her ears, to her neck, the way
her long black hair drapes across the pillow,
and you move over a little, naked and cool
under the covers, you nudge her so you can
observe the other parts of her body more closely.
The room is still half dark, so you listen to the tick-
tock of your wind-up alarm clock, which tells you
this is the bedroom you’ve slept in for years,
every evening winding that silly contraption
she gave you before you were married—so you would
remember her love each time you wound it
and set the alarm. Or else it will run down,
she’d said, and stop somewhere in the middle of the night,
and you’ll just keep sleeping.
But who is this woman beside you?
Could this be your wife? She’s beautiful, maybe
as lovely as your wife is. And when you get up
and wander through the bedroom, you notice that everything’s
just as you left it, familiar as your own
middle-aged body: the old dog asleep
on his towel in the corner is the same mutt you bought
for your children when they were just children; the house
is full of your children’s absence as you roam,
picking up books and notebooks and trinkets
they’ve left behind on their visits. But it’s still too early
to get up. You’re tired. You should go back to bed,
lie down beside this beautiful woman
who will become your wife again
in a few hours when the alarm pulls you
from dreams back into the man you’ve been
for so many years now it’s hard to remember
who you were before you became him.

(Michael Hettich [source])

…and:

The girl who hated Joni [Mitchell] and the woman who loves her seem to me… divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body. It’s the feeling we get sometimes when we find a diary we wrote, as teen-agers, or sit at dinner listening to an old friend tell some story about us of which we have no memory. It’s an everyday sensation for most of us, yet it proves a tricky sort of problem for those people who hope to make art. For though we know and recognize discontinuity in our own lives, when it comes to art we are deeply committed to the idea of continuity… It is by reading and watching consistent people on the page, stage, and screen that we are reassured of our own consistency.

This instinct in audiences can sometimes extend to whole artistic careers. I’d like to believe that I wouldn’t have been one of those infamous British people who tried to boo Dylan offstage when he went electric, but on the evidence of past form I very much fear I would have. We want our artists to remain as they were when we first loved them. But our artists want to move. Sometimes the battle becomes so violent that a perversion in the artist can occur: these days, Joni Mitchell thinks of herself more as a painter than a singer. She is so allergic to the expectations of her audience that she would rather be a perfectly nice painter than a singer touched by the sublime. That kind of anxiety about audience is often read as contempt, but Mitchell’s restlessness is only the natural side effect of her artmaking, as it is with Dylan, as it was with Joyce and Picasso. Joni Mitchell doesn’t want to live in my dream, stuck as it is in an eternal 1971—her life has its own time. There is simply not enough time in her life for her to be the Joni of my memory forever. The worst possible thing for an artist is to exist as a feature of somebody else’s epiphany.

(Zadie Smith [source])