Phantasmagoric.

The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action, for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.

Robert Louis Stevenson from “The Lantern-Bearers”

Dream.

SHIP-MODEL KIT

The lid of its box had a colorful picture

of a four-masted clipper unzipping

a blue ocean that had been loosely

laid out, its folds rolling, its opened

lapels showing a foamy white lining,

far more color right there on that flat

cardboard carton than on the millions

of pieces inside, all the same gray

like lead soldiers, and all fastened

together, tab to tab, plastic cast

as one piece, much like the long folds

of dolls that my Grandmother Kooser

snipped out of the Ames Daily Tribune

just to entertain me and my sister,

though all that had happened before

I’d grown older and ready to take on

an expensive, elaborate ship-model

kit with an accordion-fold of thin

paper instructions, hundreds of words

I had almost no patience for reading,

wanting to start where I wanted to

start, gluing together the few pieces

I recognized, laying the miniature

oars over the laps of the lifeboats,

etc., but this time I made myself

follow directions, having made wastes

of other such kits—fighter planes,

locomotives and cars—and I laid it

all out in my room on a card-table,

the halves of the hull, all the sails,

full, quarter and jib, like seashells,

all of the miscellaneous pieces

that a ship had to have to be real,

right down to the thin little ladders

of rigging to climb to the yardarms,

there to sit, keeping my balance

despite a stiff breeze, looking out

over the sea of my room, the night

with its crickets like ropes and spars

creaking below my screen window,

the waves I could feel going slack

at their edges, the faraway harbors

with their busy bazaars going quiet,

the salty nets drawn up and drying,

their glass floats like small bubbles

in the night’s iridescence, as I bent

squinting over the bits of that ship

I was building to dream me away.

Ted Kooser

Omnipresence.

He felt within him an endless inclination to stillness, to contemplation, to silence. He often stopped in the middle of a street, in the middle of a room to listen. Listen to what? Listen to everything. He felt like a light, stealthy, solitary hermit, who walks with invisible steps in the forest and who hangs to catch all the sounds, all the mysteries, all the accomplishments. He wanted to walk for years in cities and in forests, to be nowhere and to be everywhere. The dreamer has a divine taste for omnipresence.

Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

Dreaming.

Wyeth, Thin Ice, 1969

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there.  I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Andrew Wyeth

Dreaming.

To kill our dream life would be to kill ourselves, to mutilate our soul. Dreaming is the one thing we have that's really ours, invulnerably and inalterably ours.

Fernando Pessoa

Travel'd.

The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel'd to heaven is no artist.

William Blake

Continue.

Leighton, Cymon and Iphigenia, 1884

Now, as you awaken, remember the swan's
last dance. Did you dance with young angels
while you were dreaming? Did the butterfly
light you up when it burned with the eternal
light of the rose? Did the phoenix appear clearly
before you and call you by your name?
Did you see the morning dawn through the fingers
of the one you love? Did you touch
the dream with your hand or did you
leave it to dream alone, aware suddenly
of your own absence? Dreamers don't abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream … tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I'll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan.

Mahmoud Darwish

Widely.

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

Fernando Pessoa

Napping.

AUGUST AFTERNOON: NAPPING in a CABIN near ENNIS, MONTANA

Seven different shades of green

well up and reach out

and wrap their slender arms

around my shoulders and thighs.

My friend Jim asks if I have a pencil.

I realize it’s only a dream,

and I’m not obliged to write it down.

I don’t want to wake up yet,

to leave the tendrils I’m loving.

A horse nickers in the deep summer grass,

and I’m willing to believe—

though he stamps his foot,

and I hear the swish of it through the window—

that he’s grazing in the green of my dream.

Now I hear someone trying to start

a rusty old pump-wheel,

but it turns out to be sandhill cranes

yodeling extravagantly

from the bog beyond the river willows.

“Do you have a pencil,” he asks.

Dan Gerber

Beyond.

I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer.   I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live.  I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be.  Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry.  I only ever desired what was beyond my imaginings.

Fernando Passoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Dream.

Dreaming.

I began as a young poet, standing on the roof looking at the moon and stars, smelling and listening to the swamp out back, dreaming the world.

Jim Harrison

Happy birthday, Blixen.

Karen von Blixen was born on this day in 1885.

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of. Strangers appear and are friends or enemies, although the person who dreams has never done anything about them. The ideas of flight and pursuit are recurrent in dreams and are equally enrapturing. Excellent witty things are said by everybody. It is true that if remembered in the daytime they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one eams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency. All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, an unearthly bliss. He is a privileged person, the one who has got nothing to do, but for whose enrichment and pleasure all things are brought together; the Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts. He takes part in a great battle or ball, and wonders the while that he should be, in the midst of those events, so far privileged as to be lying down. It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom: it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is activity to all sides, and it is none of your concern.

Isak Dinesen, from Out of Africa

Poetry.

I’ve never aspired to be more than a dreamer. I paid no attention to those who spoke to me of living. I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be. Whatever isn’t mine, no matter how base, has always had poetry for me. The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I’ve always been attracted to what’s in the distance.

Fernando Pessoa

Protects.

Continue.

O'Keeffe, You are the Sun, 1977

Now, as you awaken, remember the swan's
last dance. Did you dance with young angels
while you were dreaming? Did the butterfly
light you up when it burned with the eternal
light of the rose? Did the phoenix appear clearly
before you and call you by your name?
Did you see the morning dawn through the fingers
of the one you love? Did you touch
the dream with your hand or did you
leave it to dream alone, aware suddenly
of your own absence? Dreamers don't abandon
their dreams, they flare and continue
the life they have in the dream…tell me
how you lived your dream in a certain place
and I'll tell you who you are. And now,
as you awaken, remember if you have wronged
your dream. And if you have, then remember
the last dance of the swan.

Mahmoud Darwish

Beppe Gambetta, "Wandering Aengus"

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Henry David Thoreau

The SONG of WANDERING AENGUS

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W.B. Yeats

Dream.

Be careful when you eat bear because you will dream of bears.

Jim Harrison

Songlines.

The best-known connection between footfall, knowledge and memory is the Aboriginal Australian vision of the Songlines. According to this cosmogony, the world was created in an epoch known as the Dreamtime, when the Ancestors emerged to find the earth a black, flat, featureless terrain. They began to walk out across this non-place, and as they walked they broke through the crust of the earth and released the sleeping life beneath it, so that the landscape sprang up into being with each pace. As Bruce Chatwin explained in his flawed but influential account, ‘each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints'. Depending on where they fell, these foot-notes became linked with particular features of the landscape. Thus the world was covered by ‘Dreaming-tracks’ that ‘lay over the land as “ways” of communication’, each track having its corresponding Song.  To sing out was–-and still is, just about, for the Songs survive, though more and more of them slip away with each generation–-therefore to find one’s way, and storytelling was indivisible from wayfaring.

Robert MacFarlane

If.

What if you slept?

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge