Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of the death of my father, Harold Leonard Chern. In some ways it is hard to believe that it has been that long, as it kind of stopped the world it seems. These things must take longer to process than you expect. He was 94, but would have been 95 that year, so he’d be 100 this year. That was what he wanted once he had gotten past the landmarks of age 72, by which time he had expected to die because every other male in the family had, and his then sprouted goal of seeing the year 2000. Various things had pretty much let him down the last couple of years, though. His body was dried and shrunken and his living conditions in the nursing home were easily as feeble a remnant of what he had once built up. But, if you asked him how he was, lying in that bed barely able to move, he would say “couldn’t be better.” (Both he and my mother had fewer complaints as the end of the fall approached than when they were in their prime.) Enlightenment, drugs, humor, attempted staving off of plug-pullers; it’s complex sorting out what that meant or what inspiration I can draw from it. I often (tonight) feel like I’m still doing it just for my parents, and that someone is watching and judging me as I do an increasingly poor job of carrying out some final commissions. (one of my father’s last admonitions was to remember that I’m “important”. But, was that just to him, and what if he is gone and doesn’t need me any more?). I then think at least I might carry them to their centennials, and light that ‘soul candle’ in my mind.
Category: journal
Dream Journal entry
Long dream, one of those ones I returned to after half-awakening several times. It was terrifying but wildly magical, so I couldn’t help wanting to see what happened. Well, hell, since everything was in the process of being destroyed I wanted to stick around in the hopes there would be a good twist. It was just about looking like there might be, and I wouldn’t have gotten up but a stink-bug started buzzing in the window above my bed, and I knew it would soon be finding its way INTO my bed, and trying to cuddle. I keep telling them, I’m not into them in that way. Jumped up with more verve than usual for the last 20 years, and the details of the dream were already vanishing. Wish I could get a DVR for these things. I’m going to write what I remember here, looking for pen and paper will just let more escape. could be long even though a fragment.
Fragments. Foreign guy of unknown ethnicity on the road giving me some sort of cryptic predictions and sense of mission. Later more or less back in a best-case version of my ordinary life, in a cluttered rental puttering about poking at the thousand unfinished projects. Little girl who comes through the window (followed by a pet or a random stray maybe?) Woman who may be a parent tasks me with hanging with her, other important things to attend to. but there is a sense that there is something urgently important and also not that easy in keeping the girl safe. The girl is just totally fun and whacky and doesn’t think anything of crawling up on the roof and/or other dangerously wrong fun. But with a way of making it right by feeling it is. Mysterious couple, maybe self-representing as guardians. Ready to take custody. Too contained, too rich, too smart. Turn out to be involved in some grand evil scheme, fundamentally deconstructing reality (or illusion, depending on your belief system), or at least the threads of the weave that make it sometimes bearable, sometimes enjoyable for us. After some melting and reconstituting, precipitous hanging, a couple changes of residence… I don’t know, bunch of shit happened. Finally escape was necessary for a small band of allies, some method that further played on my fear of heights… balloon? top of a very tall truck or yak?… much of what had been going on was explained by the girl as she told us she realized that it was her irrational imagination that was able to reverse the destructive events, just because of the strength of her belief in things reforming. But, as she explained this it became clear that she had suddenly become mature enough to express it to us in words and thus too mature to have the power any more. By this time we were passing through a landscape with little life and mostly broken architecture and sidewalks. Foreign guy from beginning of dream passes us driving a busload of dead, broken and bleeding Mexicans. Looks pretty hopeless to me, but he is going on with grim determination and I know he has best possible repairs in mind. The girl is starting to lose it, succumbing to weeping nostalgia: “I wish we could be back in that place” and I see a picture of that bottom half of a house with the porch on front where she crawled through the window in the first place. As she starts to dissolve into it, the older woman, now holding her hand, suddenly becomes intent and as she gives me a knowing look. I know what she’s thinking. And I can feel that it may be true. The girl is becoming irrational and going back to early childhood, and if everyone can let go enough it will become true and the magic will be able to work again…
the dreams of sisyphus
this was tonight’s FaceBook status, which will give you a good idea of why I should just keep to myself. This is not really written, it’s ejaculated. If were to come back and re-write, maybe I would put in something about how beautiful the stone and the grain and complexity and the beauty of the drawing upon it and the magic of it’s transmogrification and transmission were to me. though, if the images couldn’t do that, though, what use are mere words.
What’s on my mind? The dream I had last night: another return to the lithography shop. I keep finding myself back there, in spite of the incalculable threat to my back condition, the increasingly insurmountable time and money challenges, and the general hostility and toxicity of the art school environment. Always trying to sneak in a few hours at the end of a semester when no one is looking. searching for that large stone with the drawing I’ve been working on for 10 years (which in reality is in my basement, far too far from a press) and wondering if it has survived. (the teacher had a tendency to hand my stones out to other students to grind off and re-use even if I still had an image on them.) I have even had a dream where I was lying down and hugging a litho stone. but, this was a real shop dream full of technical details and difficulties. first, the drawing looked a little pale and the surface looked kind of liquid. wait! has the teacher gone ahead and etched it? No, wait, I remembered, I did get around to doing a first etch. so, it was at that crucial stage where the drawing had to be washed out with solvent through the gum mask, and some idiot at the sink sloshes water over it which dissolves the gum arabic, except for the adsorbed film, making it impossible to rub in the thin asphaltum base before inking it… not to mention the bits of carborundum grit in the graining sink water… so, great difficulties but still something more than I have left in my real life where I hardly even feel like heating up that frozen dinner tonight.
Anyway, then I was trying to get some help moving the stone from the sink to a table to try to roll it up anyway, and asking someone (over and over and over) to please bring the fork-lift over, and this Tarzan-like guy was going to help me shove it over. “Don’t pick it up”, says I. He starts to pick up his side. “”DON’T PICK IT UP!!!” I suggest gently. (the way to move a 200+ lb. stone is to slide and shove it.) So, he picks it up, and I’m stuck holding up my side as well until I can convince him to gently set it down again. (the stones are brittle and fragile as well as heavy.) I woke up with my back aching, barely able to straighten up.
Well, then again, a couple days ago I had a dream I was eating Cheetos. That longing, anyway, I was able to fulfill. (they don’t make ’em like they used to, though.)
Bike Good (car bad) part 6
A check to be deposited from my one remaining student gave me the extra push to get out on my bike in spite of myself. As I no doubt said often this week, if only to myself, I hate these all too rare and oh so beautiful days when they come and go while I don’t have the time or strength to enjoy them. There was one quick shot of real Indian Summer, and I went to work, had a short walk, and went back to bed. Today was not quite so balmy, but as pretty a year as when she was young. So, finally, not long before sundown, I wobbled down the alley and just hoped the momentum would come from somewhere.
Of course, once I get out I never want to go home. One of these days I suppose I won’t. Dusk is really the ideal time to be riding, I don’t care what you diurnals say, especially right now with the sun and moon teeter-tottering across the river. The wild variety of autumn leaves we are so blessed with in Ohio makes a passing impression too varied and complex to linger; what really Moooves me, man (Muddy Waters) is the soft purple poured along the horizon contrasting with the warm ochre that underlies all of the vegetation.
In local news, I’m happy to report they’ve finished the fussing over the Henderson Road Bridge, and I no longer feel like I will tip over into the river any second while doing the pass over.
Darn brisk down by the river this evening. I guess I’m going to have to start using gloves and get something for under the helmet if I’m going to continue getting these moments of enjoyment out of the illusion in coming months. though, eventually, the focus moved off of the chill on my hands and head and all focused on my face. Maybe because of the dew and frost accumulating in my beard. I began to develop a theory, looking down at my bright red hands, that somehow it was the redness that was making them feel warmer. Maybe they were on fire.
At the same time, the Olentangy was in an uproar, rising in breakers. I thought I must be
entering the wild and usually hidden territories, when I saw the sign hanging from the side of a bridge, “DANGER DAM.” Strange thing to name a bridge I thought. arf arf. quack quack. Just past the tiny dam, in calmer thinner waters, the ducks and geese arranged themselves in an accommodatingly decorous manner just across from some sitting benches. but, it was getting chillier by the moment and I kept moving, on up to the lake.
There, since I didn’t really know what I would be doing about dinner, I unraveled one of my socks and cast it into the water to catch a pile of catfish, a brace of mahi-mahi, and an old Wendell Wilkie button.
back in reality, I did spy a girl on a tricycle with her helmet perched on the side of her head, like the high-tone ladies all do. No doubt she’d be well padded if she happened to fall over to that side.
then the sun went down. The moon played in the waviest part of the water where I stop on the bridge right before turning down the path back to the commercial sector.
I guess that’s more complete than the previous chapters, anyway. If you’re wondering where they are, they are either partially written or lost in my head somewhere. I write these things while I’m riding, and then don’t feel much like doing all the typing once I start to wind down. I suppose I should get a portable recorder. But, I don’t even use an iPod while riding. I like the depth and resolution of the soundtrack of the ‘world’, even if I do end up riding next to a freeway most of the time. There’s still this spaciousness to the illusion; the level of detail in this simulation is beyond an individuals ability to absorb! I’m put in mind of Cliff’s idea of practicing ‘decentralization’. I had mostly thought of decentralization in terms of industrial and economic issues, but he was talking in terms of consciousness; trying to visualize further and further out in a radius away from himself. In the open air, one can try to listen on beyond the horizon. The earphone world is just the opposite of this, trying to take everything and compress it down and shove it into the center of one’s smallest version of the world, that pesky devouring skull.