Dream Log: Art and Ohio State

I can remember a lot of my dreams since the coronavirus crisis started. Last night's dream was the first one where there was a pandemic in the dream.

I was in Columbus, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio State University,

in order to attend a meeting intended to aid low-income people. However, the other people at the meeting would not respect social distancing from me, so I left before the meeting started, and wandered around the campus. On the way out of the meeting I found a key on the floor, but I didn't know what to do with it.

Social distancing was not being respected very much at all: for example, an Ohio State football game was about to get underway. I steered clear of the football crowd. On my way past them, I noticed a group of about twenty people in wheelchairs. A member of the Ohio State football team got behind each wheelchair, and together they ran, pushing the wheelchairs ahead of them, into the stadium. The crowd roared as soon as they got a sight of the speeding wheelchairs.

I walked through some campus buildings, looking at some library books which were not shelved in the main library. One book was a literary-and-visual-arts journal for Chilean expatriates. It was written in English, but everything was full of Chilean references which I did not get. I liked the illustrations, though, many of which were in a colorful sort of post-Matisse style.

Then an idiot neighbor of mine, several houses away, woke me up with a hammer and an electrical saw, making some stupid home-improvement stuff, just as he has been waking me up -- and quite a few others in the neighborhood, I'm sure -- very early most Sunday mornings for a long, long time. However, I fell asleep again very quickly, and in my dream, now I was both in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State, and simultaneously at home in Ann Arbor. And my neighbor was no longer a home-improvement boob oblivious to his neighbors and their sleep patterns, and was now instead an artist who used the hammer and saw to make works consisting of vertical rows of wooden panels about 15 inches square. An interesting thing about the panels was that they were decorated -- with paint, mostly -- in a very wide array of colors and styles. I made two fabric panels the same size as his wooden panels, one with a silkscreened image of an early-20th-century American politician, and the other very colorful,and hard-edged, very post-Ellsworth Kelly:

I offered these pieces of fabric to my neighbor, for him to add to the wooden artworks. He bought the one with the silkscreen image of the politician for $10, and passed on the colorful hard-edged piece.

Then I was back in Columbus. I met someone I knew decades ago when I lived in Columbus, and we sat in a huge deserted student union building outside of a shuttered cafe, talking. Suddenly the cafe's manager appeared, tossed me a bunch of keys on a ring and walked away. Just like with the key I'd found outside the meeting earlier, I had no idea what I should do with these keys. Then I woke up.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part III, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

Okay, we're up to the Renaissance now. Except that I don't think it should be referred to as the "Renaissance." The word "renaissance" is French for "rebirth." The implication is that ancient culture, especially Greek culture, was reborn in Western Europe beginning around the 14th century. But Greek culture, philosophy based on thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, literature inspired by Homer and the Attic tragedies and Alexandrian comedies, art inspired by the ancients, had not died out, just because the West was ignorant of such things. People never stopped reading ancient Greek in the Eastern Roman Empire, in "Byzantium." The ancient Greeks were also very widely studied in Islamic lands while Western Europe was ruled by illiterates in its Middle Ages. Then, eventually, the West became more literate, and learned to study the ancient Greeks, learned with a lot of help from Greeks, and Arabs, and Turks, help which they rarely acknowledged, and rarely acknowledge to this day. But despite my etymological problems with the word "Renaissance," in its original sense of the rebirth of a culture which had never died, and despite the fact that it's inaccurate to say that you rediscovered something you didn't know to begin with, as opposed to acknowledging that someone else taught it to to you -- despite all that, there's no denying that in the age known as the Renaissance great changes occurred in the West, great advances in science and technology -- again, often acclaimed as Western "discoveries" when they were actually borrowing from elsewhere -- great growth of cities, of trade and commerce, great plunder of the civilizations of the Western Hemisphere whose people were devastated by European guns and diseases and ruthlessness. It's well established by now that Leif Ericsson reached Canada around AD 1000. He may not have been the first European to sail west to the "New World." Irish monks, hermits who took to the sea because Ireland didn't have any deserts, got as far west as Iceland before any Scandinavians did, and who knows how far west some of them got. Samuel Eliot Morison covered the Age of Discovery very well in The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600 and The European Discovery of America the southern Voyages 1492-1616 With Columbus and his followers we're getting into the age of European colonialism, and thinking about that is making me very depressed. It may be a while before I get to Part IV. End of Part III of the Condensed Version.