5:57 a.m. - 2024-02-19
another rambling dream post: act two
To recap act one:
After a long-winded apology, the narrator introduces our protagonist. Like Alice's White Rabbit, he's running late, and to complicate matters all the entrances to his hole are boarded-up. “Oh dear, oh dear!” indeed. He's soon rescued/enjoined by familiar characters on their own quest, and together the trio make their way to (winter) Wonderland. Which, as it so happened, was four blocks away.
At this point the narrator interrupts, at length and in italics, to criticize an in-text commentator's interruption of the dream-story itself...sigh. With the fourth wall now in splinters, the whole production begins to feel like a send-up, a post-modern farce...
Since act two is little more than an interstitial interlude, some random notes from Wonderland, I doubt it'll do much to set our narrative train back on the rails, but it should be mercifully brief. Then we'll be on to the third and final act: The Castle. Hopefully this brings with it some narrative intrigue, character development, and resolution. (Spoiler alert: nah.)
~ ~ ~
Judging from the snow piled on awnings and plowed aside into grimy curb-berms, it had been snowing on Houston Street for days, and everyone on the sidewalk was bundled-up accordingly--heads down and shoulders pinched reflexively against the cold.I noticed then that my legs, sticking out across the roll-bar above my parents' heads, were bare. It seems my outfit had come w/the car, for I was in my high-school uniform...surf trunks and battered Vans.1 Yet despite sitting atop a convertible in a snowstorm, I was unaffected by the temperature. I could appreciate the weather from a priveleged vantage then; on an aesthetic merit unprejudiced by the hardship it occasioned. Time-too remained unchanged within my immediate vicinity. Our vehicle was like a bubble moving through a syrupy snow-globe...my parents' conversation and the radio updates kept happening in “real” time while the world beyond us slowed. It was Einstein’s train car in reverse...
I mentioned that this act doesn't hold much narrative value, but in the prologue to act one I did characterize dream documentation as a “selfish exercise”...so in that spirit I'll go ahead and describe a few visual elements whose details persist.2 Sorted into three categories:
Light. The difference between the teeming exuberance of street-level lighting and the restraint of the architectural illumination above struck me as extra-evident, and a vertical pageant of jumbo snowflakes fell in slow-mo gradation through both. Bright white and uplit as they approached for landing; backlit silhouettes against the urban night overhead. Evident too was the “clarity” I associate with cold weather...as if the air was somehow more transparent? Taillights and headlamps shone distinctly, traffic signals and pedestrian cues reflected brightly on slick streets. It was the nuanced illumination of the shop-lights that held my gaze though. Florescents glared from a few busy windows; a grease-mellowed gold from the crusty fixtures of the falafel joint, antiseptic white from the Off-Track Betting site. The neon scribble above the door of a chic restaurant felt too-clever compared to the beer signs buzzin' blithely behind the dirty window of a nameless tavern, and half of the plastic Rite Aid sign was predictably dim and flickering. It was a familiar metro-cacophony of light, but fascinating when considered an sich...perceived as a chaotic quiltwork of radiance, each patch painting a parcel of sidewalk, snowbank, and passer-by in kind.
Atmosphere. The most obvious example of cold-weather clarity is of course vapor, and at half-speed I found it mesmerizingly manifest. I watched the breath of pedestrians, the huff-ed puff-ed exhaust of meat-engines en route, hang a moment longer. I saw steam billowing warm around the face of a hot-dog vendor when he opened his cart and watched it tendril around a manhole cover on one of the Avenues. The climax came when someone opened the door to a Dim Sum parlor and let dumpling-steam roll out like a wave, like something from a Miyazaki film...engulfing the sidewalk and tickling the curb, giving me pause to ask, “why can't I smell or taste in my dreams?”.
Architecture. Maybe it's because I'm a builder, but I dream in intense architectural detail. This was no exception--but before I note anything further I should address a point raised by our interruptive-interlocutor in act one. When he marveled aloud at my “extensive memory vaults”, the dude was a bit off the mark. There's no OTB site on Houston St, and that falafel joint used to be in the East Village. A proper Dim Sum parlor would have been in Chinatown of course...except the one I'm “clearly” remembering here, which was in Seattle last I dined there. So despite the seamless familiarity of the backdrop, the amount of recollective cut-and-paste is apparent in retrospect. Liberties were taken above street level as well. The buildings towered overhead like canyon walls, an impression emphasized by their uniform height and congruous rooflines, like something from a hastily-drawn Batman panel. Their facades were an unremarkable NYC mix of Neoclassical and Gothic Revival elements (terms more exciting on paper than in practice), but a singular detail differentiated these from anything I'd seen before: there were buildings “between” the buildings. How was this possible, when every structure abutted the next? Well, imagine a vertically-aligned rectangle centered on the seam between two buildings, stretching from the fourth to ninth floors height-wise, and extending some marginal width, let's say two apt units, into each. Chalk that out, cut a perfect mortise through both buildings and hammer your new structure in place like a tenon...and in case you don't find the result striking enough, design its edifice in ornate contrast to its surroundings. Organic, Baroque, Arabesque...these punctuated the length of Houston Street, solemnly lit, their lack of evident doors or windows adding to the monumental strangeness.
While I took it all in, the radio kept updating the weather situation. Things were looking dire; flights were canceled out of LaGuardia and a wreck had closed one of the bridges. My parents had decided to spent the night at the Hotel St. M___ and welcomed me to join them. I said I'd think about it, but had some business to sort out first. So we turned off of Houston, back into “real time”, and I waved goodbye as I climbed of the luggage tower and set out to find a pay phone.
1 Aloha, Mr. Hand.
2 The reliability of a dream memory is inherently suspect for the same reasons I touched on in act one...I haven't consciously edited anything but, yeah. Anyway, I refrained from extended italics this time you're welcome.
