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Boygirl? Girlboy? Beats me
Last night I dreamed paint dripped off a white wall, brightly soaked plaster falling away in handfuls from the human form beneath, a woman's torso with tintype teeth at the ends of her wrists, veiled or decapitated by the unmarked portion of wall still solid above her shoulders. Her breasts were painted with black-lashed eyes, greasepaint or pastels. I remember them a bright, flat blue, like charms against the evil eye, but I couldn't swear. It looked like a New Wave film. Years ago, I dreamed of a woman with a pair of soft, lidded eyes at the tips of her breasts; I put the image into a story which never went anywhere. If I were a surrealist painter, I could make this a recurring motif, in different perspectives and colors and more or less emphatic or careless renderings, I'm sure someone already has. My dreams all have better plotting and visual design than anything from my waking brain.
Before then, we lit the candles for the first night of Hanukkah; the tree is settling out quietly in its corner of the living room, beside my grandmother's sculpture. I now have (and have devoured)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eegatland's The Empty Kingdom (2008), the fifth in her Arthurian-Ethiopian cycle and now swinging around again from Aksum to Britain: it made me even more impatient for The Sword Dance, as though pale red-eared hounds hadn't already. Taken as representative of its series, it also made me want to construct a paper around the works of Elizabeth E. Wein, Megan Whalen Turner, and Patricia McKillip. Again, I'm sure someone has. The trick is convincing myself that's no reason I shouldn't, too.
I saw exactly one episode of this show when I was in elementary school. For years I thought it was called Children of the Sun, from the two lines I remembered of the theme song; I had no idea it was an anime. It looks so much more spectacularly strange than that one episode suggested—Scott O'Dell! Now with sixteenth-century post-apocalyptic steampunk! Lost continents for the win!—I probably need to see it. Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.
Before then, we lit the candles for the first night of Hanukkah; the tree is settling out quietly in its corner of the living room, beside my grandmother's sculpture. I now have (and have devoured)
eegatland's The Empty Kingdom (2008), the fifth in her Arthurian-Ethiopian cycle and now swinging around again from Aksum to Britain: it made me even more impatient for The Sword Dance, as though pale red-eared hounds hadn't already. Taken as representative of its series, it also made me want to construct a paper around the works of Elizabeth E. Wein, Megan Whalen Turner, and Patricia McKillip. Again, I'm sure someone has. The trick is convincing myself that's no reason I shouldn't, too.I saw exactly one episode of this show when I was in elementary school. For years I thought it was called Children of the Sun, from the two lines I remembered of the theme song; I had no idea it was an anime. It looks so much more spectacularly strange than that one episode suggested—Scott O'Dell! Now with sixteenth-century post-apocalyptic steampunk! Lost continents for the win!—I probably need to see it. Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.
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I fear your dreams. :) Actually, I am impressed by the vivid rendering in your posts and startled by how clearly you remember, or fill in. Mostly, my dreams fade before I wake, even the unpleasant ones, and I am left with either a faint sense of pleasantry or a faint sense of ill faith (the latter often accompanied by joint pain).
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No, no, don't convince yourself of that! Write the paper!
That series is another one I really must read.
Your image of the woman with eyes on her breasts reminds me of
tintype teeth: We brought home from the ocean a waterlogged driftwood staff with barnacles in it. Currently it lives on our porch, which also goes by that fanciful suburban name of "deck," a funny name for an appendage to a landlocked structure.
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That is an amazing dream image. People inside the walls.
The trick is convincing myself that's no reason I shouldn't, too.
Exactly.
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I feel as though I've seen a painting like that, somewhere...
(OK, not terribly helpful)
Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.
< g >
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Isn't she a character in Nights at the Circus? In Madam Schrenk's dark brothel? Only her eyes were real.
And from the sublimely horrific to the just plain horrible, several witnesses and I just saw her hanging in the Museum of Bad Art
Nine
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Nine
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The book sounds interesting--I should go look for that series, I suppose.
You should write that paper, even if somebody else already has done. I'd like to read it, for one.
The show sounds fascinatingly odd. I hope you can find more of it to see.
Someday I'm going to rediscover a piece of my childhood that's less weird than I remember and I'm going to be devastated.
I certainly hope not.
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I heard an excerpt at last year's Readercon. It promised serious awesomeness.
Actually, I am impressed by the vivid rendering in your posts and startled by how clearly you remember, or fill in.
I don't remember them all. Maybe three to half a dozen dreams a month stick with me past that waking sensation of something just forgotten; the really frustrating ones are not images, but plot. A few nights ago, I had incredibly anime dreams, the first set about a group of people with semi-supernatural powers; then I woke up at dawn and when I fell back asleep, the same group of people had been precipitated out into a kind of university setting, their identities and their talents rearranged, and they were all trying to figure out, based on their memories and traits now, who they had originally been. The character I was particularly close to had a talent for taking advantage of people's willingness to fill in blind spots—mostly mistaken impressions, but he could be almost invisble if necessary, taken for almost anyone—and as the dream progressed, it became clear that he didn't align with anyone's recollection of the previous group. He hadn't been one of them. Strictly speaking, he hadn't even been human; he had been something like a wooden statue in a cathedral clockwork that tolled the hours, and when the changes (whatever they were; it's sort of like REM-sleep metafiction) occurred, he had leapt into chance and mortality. That's all I remember. What do I do with that? My unconscious is so much better at plot and premise and setup than my waking brain, I don't think I'm up to its standards.
Mostly, my dreams fade before I wake, even the unpleasant ones, and I am left with either a faint sense of pleasantry or a faint sense of ill faith (the latter often accompanied by joint pain).
. . . That's not good!
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I think you misconstrued the negatives in that sentence. I am trying to convince myself to write it.
But never mind him; I think I might like it.
The first book, The Winter Prince, is one of the best pieces of Arthurian retelling that exists. You should also know it has the solstice and a mummers' play.
We brought home from the ocean a waterlogged driftwood staff with barnacles in it.
Dude.
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I will let you know if it is weird enough now.
That is an amazing dream image. People inside the walls.
You want, go for it.
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In fifth grade, how was it?
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It's not useless. I don't remember it, but I might have seen the same painting. All sorts of things went into my brain I only noticed years later.
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You should. The Winter Prince (1993), A Coalition of Lions (2003), The Sunbird (2004), The Lion Hunter (2007), The Empty Kingdom (2008). There is also a short story, "No Human Hands to Touch" (Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, 1998). The books lean progressively away from the Arthurian mythos and toward Aksumite history, but the last one is beginning to lean back. I recommend them all regardless.
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I really am working on it!
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That was the older dream. The story is still word-scrap somewhere on my computer, partly because it was set in some wintry secondary world and partly because all I had on the characters was that one scene and a trick of etymology:
Her breasts were tipped with eyes, as rosy-soft as her nipples might have been, and at first Gire did not dare to touch them; she did not know what their lids might feel like, blinking against the palms of her hands, what the Inseer might see through her sweating skin, budded eyes looking into the bones and blood of her, her desire, her fear; and she flushed and drew away from Imnamu and her strange hands and eyes, apologizing, losing words even as she tried until she subsided into a hot silence and stared downward at her own locked hands and the whitened spaces she was pressing into her own flesh.
Oh, first year of college. Thank God for T.S. Eliot's juvenilia.
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