The siren call beyond the treeline

I am barely sleeping these days, but sometime long after it was light out, I had a dream of the sea I wanted to stay asleep for. A lot of it was objects, like a cabinet of things that would be stories if you asked for them, ropes and stays and burnt-edged maps, Fresnel lenses, the dry bleached shells of crabs. I was watching a kind of shadow show on sheets hung up like sails. In the mummers' play of the sea, the shipwrecked man is thrown ashore in chains of kelp as red as rotted iron, entangled in the nets that were his clothes before the jealous salt and the workings of the sun. The tide-lines duel for him with splintered staves of lobster pot and bucklers of driftwood, high and low until the last wave tumbles out and the magician kneels over him, one hand upraised with an eel the color of wet pewter signing infinity about her wrist. When he comes back to life, he's dressed in guisers' ribbons of weed, but he trudges inland, following her, without a look back. I was woken up abruptly and everything else drained out of my head.

I just found the music video for Timber Timbre's "Black Water," which is pretty great. I love how much they sound like the score to a movie that never existed.

I will be in New York City tomorrow for the Marvell Rep's staged reading of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun nekome, 1907). Given how I've been feeling for the last more weeks than I can count, I don't think this is the kind of trip where I can ask who's free to hang out, but I should do one of those sometime.