Month: August 2021

Reading like a Dream

Read as if you are reading a dream.

We all dream, and so the experience is not uncommon. We fly, we fuck, we fall. Jungians and archetypalists of all sorts would normalize and defragment the conspicuously bad writing in dreams to give them viable and understandable meaning. Last night—in the morning, really, when I cadged an extra hour of sleep after my alarm gently nudged me—I dreamed about lifting weights. The gym—a fancy place with magnetically attaching plates—did not have—or rather, did not seem to have—bars long enough for bench presses. I had to go outside—in the dark, behind what appeared to be a dock or loading bay—to find the six-foot-long, forty-five-pound bars. Then I put plates on the bar, started lifting, and the weights felt light. I told my friend, Brian (yes, I have a friend who shares my name), who was spotting me, to stop helping me. I was covered in sheets. The word that came to mind was “shroud,” and it was getting in the way. I needed to take it off. Then I woke up.

Yes, this dream is poorly written—a shroud? Really? Concelo ex machina. I remember thinking, “Get this fucking thing off me!” Yes, I curse as much in my dreams as in real life. Obvious, clunky, and weird.

I forgot to mention that the gym was in a hotel in Marseilles. My mind populated the rain-wet streets with a raft of people of different nationalities, all drawn to the port city—a city that is liminal in real life and not just my dreams. I heard them speaking French, Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi and knew that I could not communicate with them even as I heard them. They would not be able to tell me where to go—where the weights were—even if they knew.

There isn’t a book (or website, or Reddit thread) that will provide a definitive interpretation of a dream because there isn’t one. Even our own dreams unravel without narrative coherence or discernible significance. And they are our own dreams! Who better than the dreamer to make sense of the image soup that our brains simmer in the night? Besides, they almost always end with “And then I woke up.” So we rarely encounter a well-orchestrated climax and satisfying denouement.

Imagine, for a moment, treating what we read as if they were dreams. What if, instead of artistic unities, we sought to immerse ourselves the same way we are immersed in dreams. “Why not like life?” you ask. We exert—or attempt to exert—control over life. The homeostatic drive irons out all that is strange or random or, well, dream-like. In dreams, even for the lucid dreamer, there is an element of the unexpected. The joy (jouissance?) of dreams comes in their unpredictability. When else in life do we forsake prediction for sheer experience? 

I struggled to teach my advanced students how to “read like a professor” because they sought to corral meaning. What they read needed to reflect their experiences or interests. But then, I also struggled with my professors and grad school colleagues, who also harnessed what they read to suit their beliefs. Few readers meet the work and let themselves alter when they alteration find. We have a terribly hard time meeting the wild with our own wildness. Besides, surprise, the harbinger of change, runs counter to how our brains process information. Brains—by design—seek to match what happens with deeply rooted predictions. We predict and demand that the world conforms to our predictions. I am drawing on the work of Mark Solms for this.

What if, instead, we read literature like reading a dream?

First, we must know the dreamer better—or, at the very least, recognize that the dream comes from a profoundly intimate and personal space that is entirely subjective and therefore unqualifiable compared to our lived experience. While there may be correspondences with our dreams, relying on what we know of ourselves will lead not so much to a misinterpretation as a “mis-experience” of the dream. While holding up a mirror to ourselves is absolutely enchanting (and even, at times, essential), it becomes a solipsistic activity when left unleavened by a deep understanding of the dreamer.

Second, just as dreams surprise us, we need to be astounded by what we read.  Even if we are reading a novel in a class on post-colonialism, even if the novel makes straightforward claims about the post-colonial world, reading it only as an exemplar will circumscribe the work’s overall effect. It will remove the dreaminess of the work, and in that dream, there may be more (or less) about post-colonialism than we imagined at first. Pardon me while I carry this a step forward; we cannot colonize dreams with reason.

The same way that an out-of-place detail (that shroud!) opens up ways of understanding a dream, it is precisely literature’s ability to flash incongruous elements into being—not only as counterpoint but as mawing gaps in the well-knit Markov blankets of perception. We are lulled into a kind of affirmative satisfaction when pleasantly predictable patterns repeat. The surprises, the mistakes, and the interruptions all unravel the carefully constructed conceptions leaving what? A mad scramble to reweave—midnight (or midmorning) Penelopes trying to stay one step ahead of the rapacious reason-making suitors.

Dreams are strange, and most writing is not. Most writing belies its transactional origins. It keeps accounts, documents ownership, concretizes agreements, or dissolves partnerships. Most writing is officious and tedious. Dreams are not. Granted, we may feel that another person’s accounts of their nighttime rambles are inexplicable and therefore of little interest to us. Still, compared to a bill of sale or divorce decrees, they are candyfloss. The harder bone to chew is that we are primarily transactional beings. Writing reflects our need to organize and regiment experience to a suitable and predictable medium.

Dreams are a rebellion in our brains. While we spend our days demanding sense, dreams help settle a more extraordinary account—that of strangeness and unpredictability. Literature is a semi-intentional settling of accounts. It balances the need for predictable and measurable outcomes with the unsettled and unreliable aspects of existence. And if you make sense of last night’s dream, there is more confusion ahead. Why not court confusion and read to dissent with all common sense?

I go back to Mrs. Dalloway and how Septimus Smith’s death made Clarissa “feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” Few moments feel as gloriously incongruous as that—as disruptive and necessarily reframing. You cannot read Mrs. Dalloway the same after that moment, and if you are a serious reader, you better start all over again. I will suggest that almost all works of literature have such moments—or several such moments—that just don’t fit. Or completely fit. Each one shatters the pattern and forces the reader to reconsider and reconceive.

There’s a reason that we do not experience reality the same way we experience dreams. It is impossible to have the world perpetually exploded and rearranged out of order. I may seem to critique how we live when I make claims about our essentially transactional natures; I am not. But I see the tension between the drive and indefatigable desire for predictable outcomes and the violently unpredictable nature of complex systems. Reading literature is not a way to practice making sense but of recognizing the failure of making sense. We must need to constantly reassess, and recognize that even in a world that we have (subconsciously) organized (that cleanly appointed gym in a hotel in Marseilles) that there are twists and turns ahead. We need to learn that the world is more unpredictable, more incongruous than we would like. As are we.

The Play of Light

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day, 1903

People at the National Gallery walk past Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day, and stop in front of The Houses of Parliament, Sunset, or The Seine at Giverny. I get it; those paintings are suffused with light—even the sun setting in the West behind the shadowy edifice of the Houses of Parliament gives the evening painting an elegant aura. The sun is barely present in Waterloo Bridge, Gray Day, which should not be a surprise in smoke throttled London. But there is no shine—instead of the billows of white smoke in a train yard, or the reflected sun in a lily pond, this is just gray. Another typical London afternoon.

The painting bears all the hallmarks of Impressionism: surfaces broken into brushstrokes, a scene captured with immediacy and revealing a moment. If it were not flanked by brighter canvases, would you stop? Who knows? This painting is gray—the day was gray—and Monet mutes his palette. People move on.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Philemon and Baucis, 1658

We are drawn to light. In a wood-paneled room of Rembrandts (Gallery 51), the glints and swaths of light in the dark paintings stand out. There may be details in those dour portraits; still, our gaze focuses on those bright patches. Rembrandt uses light to command our eyes toward the centers of the works—or in the case of Philemon and Baucis, to the right side of the painting, where a nimbus flares up behind Philemon—as it should, she received Zeus and Hermes when other, wealthier neighbors turned the gods away. Rembrandt does not play with light like De La Tour (The Repentant Magdalen, with the skull—a memento mori—only seen reflected in a mirror, shows off his use of light). He lights what matters most—this is key lighting, not bravura technique. But this is how we see, and this is what he (or his patrons) wants you to see. He knows that our gaze is like a moth, drawn inexorably to the flame.

John Singer Sargent, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White, 1883

In Gallery 69, Whistler’s Symphony in White uses the bright cuff of Joanna Hiffernan’s dress not to focus the viewer but to prevent our look from settling here or there. Even the wolf rug’s gaping mouth—in and of itself a supreme irony—does not fix us. We can apply some meaning, but the painting fights against allegory and symbolism. It’s white, only white. Across the room, Sargent uses a flash of white to guide our gaze from the transfixing stare of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherford White to a point just at her left hip. Sargent’s portait has other work to do. The flash of white is a sleight of hand—and it is Mrs. White’s left hand, in the shadow formed by the folds of her dress, that holds a small bottle. We cannot smell her perfume—it’s a painting, just a painting—but Whistler lets us know that she is not above such enticement. She is not a painting or symphony or play of light.

Claude Monet, The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil, 1881

I tease my students while making a point. I wave my fingers in the air up and to my right, “Bright and shiny! Bright and shiny!” We are eminently distractible—they are; I am. A short woman in a pink shirt and a mask fashioned from a blue bandanna puts her hand on the shoulder of the short man with whom she walks through the museum, stopping for a moment in front of the sunset in one of Monet’s paintings. One part of my mind leaves the gallery room with them. A family—two boys and a dad trailing behind mom, who pauses in front of Redon’s Pandora—enters. I don’t know whether they are from out of town and making the fleeting pilgrimage or revisiting. They leave too quickly for me to ask. Instead, I talk to the couple on the bench beside me, and a woman confesses that she fell in love with Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil when she was 8. “It was everything,” she says. She paints.

I am jealous of painters and their use of color and light to direct the audience’s gaze around their work. Like a symphony, they speed our eyes and slow them down, distract us with flourishes, and satisfy us with thematic or chromatic resonances and unities. Yes, we will “read” the subject, but the paintings open in a dozen other ways, all at once, convincing us and vexing our expectations. I seek to do as much. The galleries inspire me.

Swimming and Time

Every time I touched the wall, I looked up to check my time. The spinning red hand of the clock revealed how long it had taken since I began whatever swim I had started, however many seconds—or minutes—ago. We did two things at practice: we threw yards and meters at our bodies and practiced touching the wall. Whether it was a grueling set of 20×100 yard swims on a 65-second interval to wrap up a workout or the inane 3×1500 meter swims with 30 seconds between each as a warm-up (Imagine doing that at 6 o’clock in the morning on an already warm summer day, in a pool with only thin nylon ropes to separate the lanes), whenever you finished, you jammed into the wall. You lifted your head from the water to see the clock. How fast did I go? How much time until the next swim begins?

I was not a world-class swimmer. When I was little, I tended to sink rather than proceed at pace. I wore a Styrofoam bubble on my back.  There were lessons. My parents took me to Red Cross run classes in a lake near our home in Paoli. I flailed, resisting the head turn required for a proper crawl. Still, I loved the water and turned blue when my parents took us to Jones Beach when we visited their parents. Who would want to leave the churn and rush of waves? We joined local pools and passed our deep-end tests, treading water for an absurd amount of time under the watchful eye of a lifeguard. Once passed, my mother would drop us off while she shopped or played tennis at the Great Valley Country Club. Swim teams only started when I was 11.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was a fair Junior Varsity swimmer. The Hill School had a nationally ranked independent school team, and I was far from fast enough for that. I was only 4 years removed from goggle-less practices in the insidiously warm indoor pool at the Phoenixville Y. I came home bleary-eyed and teary. As far as other sports, I had been an indifferent Little League baseball player—more interested in the planes in the sky than balls hit in my direction. Because I was tall early, my father—a scholarship athlete at Niagara in the 40s—signed me up for basketball. It did not take. I enjoyed gymnastics: the rings and parallel bars carried me a little out of gravity’s grasp. You had to play a sport each afternoon, fall, winter, and spring at my high school. In my first year, I opted for soccer, swimming, and golf.

The 3500 yards that the JV team swam between 3-4 in the afternoon were as many yards as I had ever swum. Fred Borger was the JV coach and threw easily attainable sets at us: ten 100s at 1:45, then 1:30 as we improved. I started off swimming the 500 yard freestyle at meets. My early times were over seven minutes. I ended my first season at 5:55. My 100 breaststroke was north of 1:20, which rarely merited placement in one of the three lanes for meets. During my second year, after spending the fall playing water polo (a ploy to get fall training in for the varsity), my 500 time dropped to 5:20, and my 100 breast hovered at 1:15. I knew if I wanted to improve, I would need to change something.

As a sidebar, I was not happy at my school, an all-boys bastion against, what? a fear of falling? I spent the spring of my sophomore year stoned and looking for a new school for the following year. I crept out after curfew and brought pizza for my dorm mates. I never studied—my memory for most things kept my grades well above water. This was the year that ditched my longstanding boyhood aspiration: to attend the Naval Academy. I wanted a more diverse, less dick-driven environment. After all, how could you read Catcher in the Rye and not feel as if you wanted to turn away?

A friend on the Varsity swim team shared a flier from a swim camp/AAU team in Iowa. Glen Patton was building the program at the University of Iowa and was contacting good young swimmers like my friend as a way of recruitment. I applied to Swimming School and was delighted to be accepted. If I wasn’t going to go anywhere else, at least I could be a better swimmer.

At Iowa, we had three practices a day, totaling as many as seven hours in the pool. I had never swum more than one hour on any day and rarely more than 4000 yards. We swam between 20,000 and 28,000 meters every day. The general philosophy was “Get in. Keep up. Move inward.” Slower swimmers—I was one of them—populated the outside lanes. You shifted from lanes one and ten to two and nine, then three and eight, and so forth. The fastest swimmers—and there were Olympians on that team—swam in the center of the pool: lanes four and five. In the two summers I swam there, I never nosed into the center (not 4 and 5, not even 3 and 6), but I could see them. I chased and swam faster. 

When I swam in Iowa in 1976, we gathered in the evenings to watch the Montreal Olympics. The American men won every event except one (Britain’s David Wilkie took the 200 Breaststroke), and the men set world records in every event except the 100 Butterfly (Mark Spitz’s last record). The East German women had a similar performance, helped, as we know now, by PEDs. The revolution in training (all those miles) caused significant drops in times for those of us who did not use steroids. We were swimming fast, and we all could swim faster. We wore T-shirts emblazoned with the motto: SWIMMING IS MORE FUN WHEN YOU’RE IN SHAPE. And we got in shape by watching our times.

When I returned to my school, I leaped onto the varsity, still not the best, but game. I kept up in practice, By the fall, I was under five minutes in the 500, and my breaststroke time dropped over ten seconds. Raw and brutal repetition rewarded me. The two-hour practices we did at school were intense and competitive. If you weren’t the leader in your lane, you damn well chased the leader, and if you caught them, then you had to lead. Leading was a privilege, but your trailing feet became targets for the hungry swimmers behind you. We each had our strengths, each took the lead on various sets. I had a vicious breaststroke kick, which meniscus surgery 30 years later can attest to. I swam hard, and even later, when I swam just to stay fit, the habits continued. I checked my pulse. I looked at the clock.

 During the 2021 Olympic swimming coverage, I saw the swimmers stare at the clock (digital, not analog) in the distance. I saw the looks of joy and disappointment driven not by winning or losing but by their times.  Was that my best? Did I meet my goal? While the competition may drive many, after a while, the clock becomes the primary combatant. I may have been cognizant of where my teammates were in the pool (chase! chase!), but mostly I looked up and saw that red clock hand sweeping past a black hash mark. Watching the Olympics, if I yelled it once, I yelled it a dozen times, “Show the times!”

The next time you watch swimmers (or runners), notice where they look at the end of their races. If you want to know how they feel, know that they are keenly aware of the inexorable, implacable opponent of the clock. They have looked up thousands of times. And then they have put their heads back down. It is time to go again.