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Honey in the rock and the sugar don't stop
I did not sleep last night. The sore throat I've been sick with since Friday turned into the kind of cough that does its best to prevent that. I had a doctor's appointment in Medford at nine o'clock, however, so at seven o'clock I crawled out of bed, drank half a carton of orange juice, stood for way too long in the grey cold to catch a bus, made my appointment exactly on time, stood for way too long in the bright cold to catch a bus, read another chapter of Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead (2012), crawled back into bed and promptly passed out: and managed to stay that way until a little before three o'clock, when I think I might have coughed my way awake again. I am not running a fever, however, and so I am still attending the rescheduled Burns Supper tonight with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and many other fine musical people. I don't know if I'll be able to sing, but there'll be whisky and I can listen. In the meantime, I'm drinking a lot of hot goat's milk and honey and tea.
I'm not sure if it was a nightmare or just the final image of a weird story: I dreamed of Dionysos after the sparagmos, put back together wrong. His skin was stitched together with ivy tendrils, suckers spidering across the fawn-colored jagged flesh; the chewed gaps of the Titans' teeth had been spackled with grape-crushings, pine-tarry staunchings of dry needles and cone-scales pushed into the holes at flank or throat or forearm. There was no blood; it had dried long ago, in grape-juice tricklings. His head was a panther's, pollen-gold and dappled, set sleek on his boy's shoulders, but its eyes were the brown and white glass of a bronze statue. It turned and saw me, blinking softly furred lids. I knew something in there lived and was divine, but I wasn't sure what it was anymore. Breaker of chains, Dionysos who rends the ordinary from the day like the skin from the skull: I hoped I hadn't prayed for him. I had been reading a book, but I can't remember if he was its last page.
In other stories—
1. Three different people sent me the news last night: two new poems of Sappho have been recovered.
2. The testimony of Pete Seeger before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, August 18, 1955. His life was a contribution.
3. Calling allnineweaving: the complete Ben Jonson is now online.
The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings. I am glad of them.
derspatchel and many other fine musical people. I don't know if I'll be able to sing, but there'll be whisky and I can listen. In the meantime, I'm drinking a lot of hot goat's milk and honey and tea.I'm not sure if it was a nightmare or just the final image of a weird story: I dreamed of Dionysos after the sparagmos, put back together wrong. His skin was stitched together with ivy tendrils, suckers spidering across the fawn-colored jagged flesh; the chewed gaps of the Titans' teeth had been spackled with grape-crushings, pine-tarry staunchings of dry needles and cone-scales pushed into the holes at flank or throat or forearm. There was no blood; it had dried long ago, in grape-juice tricklings. His head was a panther's, pollen-gold and dappled, set sleek on his boy's shoulders, but its eyes were the brown and white glass of a bronze statue. It turned and saw me, blinking softly furred lids. I knew something in there lived and was divine, but I wasn't sure what it was anymore. Breaker of chains, Dionysos who rends the ordinary from the day like the skin from the skull: I hoped I hadn't prayed for him. I had been reading a book, but I can't remember if he was its last page.
In other stories—
1. Three different people sent me the news last night: two new poems of Sappho have been recovered.
2. The testimony of Pete Seeger before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, August 18, 1955. His life was a contribution.
3. Calling all
nineweaving: the complete Ben Jonson is now online.The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings. I am glad of them.
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That dream sounds eerie.
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I'm still honored to be thought of!
That dream sounds eerie.
It was one of the kind that are more unsettling when you wake and can get a good look at them than when you're in the dream. I didn't think "zombie Dionysos" until I was trying to formulate it afterward, and then it sounded a different direction of scary than it actually was.
I dream a lot of these fusions: not so much organic/inorganic as different kinds of life or reanimation. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) had huge script and structural problems (and the cannibal island oh God the cannibal island), but Davy Jones' sea-changed sailors were one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen onscreen; I had dreamed things like them, and written and read them, but never expected to see anything similar in a summer blockbuster. It is primarily for their sake that I own the movie. Basically all the sea-myth in those films, I love; everything else I argue about.
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The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings.
This.
Nine
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I don't know what I can do with it. It would have to be the last page of a weird tale: the sudden revelation after which there is nothing left to say, but I am much less interested in building the story up to that point. Maybe something that isn't that angle at all.
This.
Thank you.
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I don't know! Mythologically, it should have been Zeus, but I don't remember anything about it in the dream one way or the other.
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That would explain the rough seams. Sewing with a lightning bolt is clumsy work, and not for over-scheduled.
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Hmm.
The Greek is right there.
I'll have to be less sick first.
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(I hope that you get better, and soon; NOT because of the hope of translations, but because that cough sounds truly vile.)
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Dammit, I got scooped by the Guardian!
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That dream is intense and fascinating. Thank you for writing about it.
Thanks for the links as well.
The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings. I am glad of them.
Very well said. I agree.
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I had a wonderful time; and even sang, which I had not been sure I'd be able to do. It was a good remembrance of all kinds of singers.
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gorgeous--if you write or dream it, are you surprised he comes?'
The dead keep singing, out of rivers, out of deserts, out of long-dry ink and just-stilled strings. I am glad of them.
--"Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul-- how can I keep from singing?"
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Not entirely, although I'm not sure how safe (I'm quite sure how unsafe) that would be.
"Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing. It sounds an echo in my soul-- how can I keep from singing?"
Yes. Thank you.
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May the dead keep singing, may we keep listening.
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(Anonymous) 2014-01-31 01:05 am (UTC)(link)Me, too. Especially considering how today went, which was awful; it's ended up feeling like the last good thing I'll have in a very, very long while.
May the dead keep singing, may we keep listening.
Amen.
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Me, too. Especially considering how today went, which was awful; it's ended up feeling like the last good thing I'll have in a very, very long while.
May the dead keep singing, may we keep listening.
Amen.
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Awesome! Maybe that'll help push back a bit of the depression I feel whenever I think about how many thousands of mummies and their possibly poetic wrappings became fuel for British trains.
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They went in the air and travelers breathed them in. Maybe a whole generation of poets sprang from that. And some activists, too.