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ReadySteadyBlog
La Feuille: "un site de critique indépendant et plutôt de qualité"
Tuesday 29 May 2007
The Annandale Dream Gazette
What is the Annandale Dream Gazette? The poet Robert Kelly explains:
Some believe the dream comes from the gods. Some believe that the dream comes from the ancestors. Some believe that dreams come from a part of the dreamer’s self usually remote or removed from consciousness. Some believe that dreams are scraps of memory and fantasy, remnants of the day. All of these beliefs are probably true enough in their ways, and certainly all have been productive of creative and analytic results. Scriptures and assassinations, benzene rings and orphic odes arise from dreams.
What if the dream is something else as well? Not individual, not a message from God or from the archetypes or from the soul. We hear Freudians speak of the language of dream, but what if dream is language, is language the way language is language: systematic, intentional, focused on saying something. What if dream is above all, exactly as language is, social. This is the aspect of the dream that is seldom considered, dream as arising from the speaking back into a community, a community of native dreamers (so to say).
It was to examine the idea that a dream seeks an intended audience outside the dreamer, that the Annandale Dream Gazette was founded years ago. The dreamer dreams towards someone—and that someone is within the community. Thus two goals are achieved by harvesting the night’s dreams and publishing them: the dream may find its intended hearer, and we may gradually come to learn the nature and shape of the community itself, the community into which one dreams.
So: the dream is public. The dream is social. The dream is communication. The dream intends to speak to you. These are the notions to investigate.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, poetry
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Books of the Week
First published in 1931 and now appearing for the first time in English, Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer is a disquieting anatomy of a deviant mind in the tradition of Crime and Punishment. Letham, the treacherously unreliable narrator, is a depraved bacteriologist whose murder of his wife is, characteristically, both instinctual and premeditated. Convicted and exiled, he attempts to atone for his crimes through science, conceiving of the book we are reading as an empirical report on himself – whose ultimate purpose may be to substitute for a conscience. Yet Letham can neither understand nor master himself. His crimes are crimes of passion, and his passions remain more or less untouched by his reason – in fact they are constantly intruding on his “report,” rigorous as it is intended to be. Both feverish and chilling, Georg Letham explores the limits of reason and the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity. Moving from an unnamed Central European city to arctic ice floes to a tropical-island prison, this layered novel – with its often grotesquely comic tone and arresting images – invites us into the darkest chambers of the human psyche.
-- View archive
To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of 'depressive' black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of 'militant dysphoria' via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction's activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the 'cold world' of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.
-- View archive
Serendipoetry
This World is not Conclusion
This World is not Conclusion.
A Species stands beyond --
Invisible, as Music --
But positive, as Sound --
It beckons, and it baffles --
Philosophy -- don't know --
And through a Riddle, at the last --
Sagacity, must go --
To guess it, puzzles scholars --
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown --
Faith slips -- and laughs, and rallies --
Blushes, if any see --
Plucks at a twig of Evidence --
And asks a Vane, the way --
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit --
Strong Hallelujahs roll --
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul --
-- Emily Dickinson
The Complete Poems (Faber & Faber)
-- View archive
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