Dream Log: Poetry, Passion, Genius, Courage

I dreamed I was back at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, in the College Scholars' program of the College of Liberal Arts. In real life, I was a College Scholar in the last couple of years before my graduation in 1989, and was a few years older than most of the other undergraduates. In the dream, it wasn't clear what year it was or how old I was, but I might have been a few years older than I had been as a real-life undergraduate. I seemed to have a little bit more perspective on things, and even gave some fatherly or mentor-ly advice to some of the other College Scholars, which was certainly not the case in real life in the 1980's.

An example of my having more perspective: I never studied well for tests in real life. In my dream, I was taking a class on English poetry. Although I still had the tendency to space out when it came to preparing for tests, in the dream I was more concerned about this tendency, and struggling against it just a bit: I asked the professor what to expect on the final exam; then I apologized and said quite honestly that I had been spacing out during her answer, and asked her to repeat it. Even after she told me a third time what to expect on the exam, I was not clear about what to expect, and I began to wonder whether the professor herself had any clear notion of what the exam was going to be like. Or perhaps she just didn't believe in describing an exam in too much detail in advance. In any case, I had all of the xeroxed poems which she had given to the class, and was going to study them all quite closely before the exam. And I had my lecture notes, and not all of them were evidence of ADD.

The Knoxville campus is quite hilly. I was at a high point, geographically, on the campus, and I had to get to a low spot very quickly. I didn't have a car, but I had a bicycle. And it was raining very hard, so hard that visibility was impaired somewhat. Still, I told myself that I had to zoom downhill through the rain and thunder.

My bike was a road-racing model, not a dirt bike designed to go over bumps and jumps; still, as I zoomed downhill, I reasoned that if I went around the several flights of steps along my way, the grassy regions through which I would go might be muddy and treacherously slippery because of the downpour. So it might be safer to stay on the concrete all the way down, even if the steps were a bit of a jolt. So I zoomed over those several flights of steps, trying to make my arms and legs give a bit to act as shock absorbers and relieve some of the stress on my bike. I was also a bit nervous that cars and buses might emerge suddenly from the deluge and onto a collision course with me.

But I got through in one piece, and my bike's frame didn't bend and its tires didn't go flat. It was a thrilling, very fast half-mile or so.

Later, I was hanging out with a few of my fellow College Scholars in the Student Center. One of them, a tall, flabby lad with glasses, was particularly passionate about poetry, and had already begun to have his poems accepted and published by prestigious journals across the country. He was talking about poetry and getting a little bit carried away. When he said something about poetry turning everyone into geniuses, I replied that it obviously hadn't done so yet, and made a gesture encompassing the Student Center and its widespread mediocrity.

A couple of our fellow Collage Scholars snickered, and the bespectacled young poet looked crestfallen. I hastened to modify my remark, telling him that he was certainly right that poetry could have a powerful effect. Perhaps not with huge masses, but with individuals. Poems could and did inspire people to do better, I said: they could lend one person the courage to ask someone out on a date, give another person the courage to do something which was noble and good instead of what was easy, encourage individuals here and there to be more open to the beautiful and true things in life. They could encourage someone to write a brilliant poem him- or herself, or compose a song or paint a picture, which in turn could inspire who knew how much good and worthwhile effort.

I looked at the two of our companions who had snickered, and added, "I'm sure that even these cynical weasels have had moments when they've been better people, as a direct result of some poem or another."

I was saying these things partly because I believed them, and partly because I was afraid that I might have damaged the young poet's fragile spirit. Whether because they believed what I had said, or because they, too, were afraid that they might have hurt the poet, or both, or for whatever reason, the two weasels who had snickered said that I was perfectly correct.

I went on: it was a struggle, being any sort of artist, but the effort was unquestionably worth it. I added that things might seem more bleak for us because we lived in the middle of an enormous nation which appreciated poetry much less than did some other countries. In some places, huge passionate crowds gathered on a regular basis to listen to poets recite their works. Perhaps, in places like those, masses actually were converted into geniuses.

I went on: but what was genius, anyway? It was one of those words, like love, over whose definition people always seemed to disagree. In any case, I said to the poet, I was honored to know a talented artist at the beginning of a great career. I said that because I meant it, and the others said they agreed.

Poets, Artists, Hollywood, Money

For a long time I thought that I was very good at remembering passages from books and dialogue from movies and TV word-for-word. In the past few years I have come to grips with the fact that I am not especially good at it. What seems to me like a vivid and exact memory to me is, over and over, in fact quite different from the original text. For example, for a long time I was quite certain that I remembered a character in a movie -- I couldn't recall what character in which movie -- saying, "When poets dream they dream of money." I'm now fairly sure that that was a mis-remembering of a line spoken by Ricky Jay's character in David Mamet's movie The Spanish Prisoner --a terrific movie, by the way, and very much about money among other things. The thing is, I'm not sure whether we're meant to understand that Jay's character is saying (approximately if not word-for-word), "As the poet said, 'Let us dream,' and when we dream, we dream of money," or, "As the poet said, 'Let us dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.'"

I had assumed it was the latter, and thought that it might make sense because poets -- poets in the USA, at least -- tend to make very little money from poetry, so that they would dream of money as naturally as hungry people dream of food.

If it's the former then it sounds much more like the attempt of a man whose business is money to lend an artistic air to his profession.

In the past couple of days I saw another character in another movie, an actress, I've already forgotten which actress and which movie, say something like, "Don't they say that artists dream of money?" The actual line may be quite different, the only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that the movie didn't seem particularly interesting to me and I didn't watch the whole thing.

Movies are probably the art form which makes the most money. Movies or pop music. Gene Siskel said, in a good PBS series about Hollywood from the early 90's, said it with notable conviction and no ifs ands or buts, that Hollywood movies were the biggest big-time in showbiz, implying that if TV people doubted this they were deluded. Remember, my mortal enemy is Cliche Man, and cliches are cliches, not necessarily, as the cliche says, because they are true, but because they sound good. But Siskel may have gotten this one right.

Guy Ritchie's movie RocknRolla --another terrific movie, by the way, and also very much with money as one of its themes --seems to suggest that rock n roll is the biggest big-time in show biz. Perhaps that's true when you compare British rock n roll to British movies, and and false when you compare the most big-time pop music to Hollywood movies.

Without a doubt, the biggest big-time Hollywood movies involve a lot of money. Folks is gettin' paid. (The producers and studios heads are gettin' paid much more than the stars.) And so perhaps this business about artists (or poets) dreaming of money, if it does not merely sound good but is also true, is more true about Hollywood movie folks than about artists in general. It may be relevant, not because it applies to impoverished artists, but, quite on the contrary, because it applies to the very wealthiest people who could conceivably be called artistic or poetic, and it may be that these rick folks are rich because they're always dreaming of money, and the poor poets and artists, generally speaking, may not miss the money as much as I would think. Perhaps, among the group of children with anything like an interest in writing, the ones more preoccupied with money tend to give up poetry before they're full-grown, in favor of writing screenplays full-time, or the better-looking ones among the potential screenwriters may have tended to have gotten their teeth whitened and noses fixed in order to go after the bigger movie-star money, if they haven't given that up to become movie execs, if they haven't given up Hollywood altogether for Wall Street, to work with people like Ricky Jay's character in The Spanish Prisoner and tell each other in their spare time that they're artistic.

As with so many posts on this blog, I have no answers here, but mainly just a few questions, which I hope some reader or another may have found to be interesting food for thought.