Saturday, February 6, 2010
Murdering Mahler
So, today, Friday, is a day without a Mahler rehearsal, but I am so physically and emotionally drained that the day is a blur. And I fall asleep at around 8 pm. Now, three hours later, I've woken up from another wild dream.
So in this dream, I'm a photographer and I've been assigned to take pictures of a very impressive wine glass collection in a huge contemporary-style house. The collection is all in one room, a huge dining room (although the dining table, later on, feels kind of like a morgue table). First, I order all the lights in the house shut off so that I can control the lighting in the dining room better. The wineglasses are in lovely glass shelves and it's my intention to take some of the standing lamps in the room and direct them so they can pick up the richness of the wineglasses' colors and textures.
But no matter which lamps I set, the room is too dark. There must be something wrong with the lamps. None of the lamps is bright enough. I call for help, for more light bulbs. All sorts of people are coming into the room now. piling boxes of light bulbs on the table. The dining table that is ... or is it the morgue table?
None of the bulbs is any good. Someone says ... Look, a German bulb! It's a small thing with a black socket and a different kind of screw that won't fit into a standard lamp. I pick it up and Curt Ayers III, a Southern gentleman who is a member of the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok, says, "Oh, ah think ah'll take that if y'all don't mind."
Holding the bulb in my hand I have a flashback ... I murdered someone in this very room ... a bald German gentleman. I am tormented by guilt. Then the dead person rears up. His bald head bears a scar from having been stitched back together ... post autopsy, perhaps. I start screaming, "I've murdered Mahler!"
Only as I wake up do I realize that this bald fat elderly corpse couldn't possibly be Mahler. It's Bruckner.
***
Is Bruckner's ghost telling me I better do his Ninth symphony as well? This call for more and more light ... is it a remembrance of Goethe's last words — "Mehr licht!" ??
Obviously anxiety has something to do with this dream, but is there something else? I didn't notice any Giacometti sculptures skulking about....
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quick go back to sleep
ReplyDeleteI want to read the second chapter!