DreamLight 4 comments

8 Feb 2004 @ 14:00, by John Ashbaugh Saturday morning, February seventh, Two sets of dreams. The man behind the desk at the Art Museum in Madison is offering me a job as a maintenance man and odd job person for half the salary I am making now. I would be willing to take the job just to be around the art. That is what I am missing in my present life. I am not around the art, and I would give a lot to get back into that world. I tell him I’m still going to school, and wonder if the job can be worked around my school schedule. He says no. His name is Mr. Spanish. He tells me to stick with the school and finish and get my Associate’s degree, and I go on my way. There is a woman with me, Linette I think, or Gail. These two are sometimes conflated together in my mind. Sisters to each other and partners to me in my world. After me and my lady have gone our way quite a distance from the museum, I recall that I already have an MA and an MFA in Art, and how could I have forgotten this? I turn around and am determined to walk back to the art museum to see if I can still get that job. The distance is quite long and the landscape is an amalgam of the three principal campuses of my life. Illinois, Wisconsin, and West Texas. The distance is far and the hour is late and I am not sure that I am going to be able to get back to Mr. Spanish’s office in time to see about that low paying almost insignificant job which is nevertheless surrounded and immersed within the landscapes and images from the universe of art history and the studios and hallways with all of their messy, spontaneous, unconditioned processes of creation. Closer and closer I get, and the landscape I travel through becomes more beautiful, while the time remaining shortens. Then there is another dream in which I am teaching one of my writing classes, and after a long writing assignment session, I give them a half hour break. I feel completely unprepared for giving them something to do or teaching them something when they return, but it doesn’t matter, for few of them do return and those that do are casual stragglers, and don’t want anything more than to know what their grade is. So they and I just desultorily waste time in the classroom. Then the situation gets around to my giving Dale and Raoul a ride home after classes are over. These are fellow Gen Ed writing teachers. First I have to drive to a grocery store parking lot where I look into the folder that I keep all of my students’ papers in because I have to check into something on one of them, and the folder is completely empty. Surprise! Oh, Well.! I step out of the car to take off my jacket to free up my arms and Dale and Raoul get in the back seat, so my freedom of movement while driving is better. I drive completely around the supermarket into what can only be described as a rutted country lane surrounded by tall waving grassland, and comment to Raoul that I bet I’m taking him through a part of Wisconsin he’s never seen before, the point being that even if he’s seen something like this before, this is the first time he’s been Here on this planet. We turn back out into the city street, like a long narrow street through a small country town, and there are interruptions and obstacles along the way, like a man and some of his cohorts dressed in medieval jesters’ costumes seriously and solemnly interrupting the flow of traffic at a makeshift crosswalk. After negotiating passage, on we drive into downtown Albuquerque, although this is no downtown Albuquerque or any other city that I have ever been to. The car has become a bicycle and Dale and Raoul are still somehow on the back and I proceed along the street into an envelope of darkness. The surrounding buildings are massive and tall, like huge, towering medieval walls of castles, and the only light anywhere to be seen is from the soft edged, yellow glowing from row upon row of rectangular windows on the sides of these buildings. I am driving into darkness, not able to see anything of where I might be going, completely unable to even see the road beneath my tires, and with no idea for determining how to guide my steering if the street should make some turn, all the while traveling between these towering dark and entirely beautiful walls with their soft-edged glowing windows of light. Finally, the dark deep fog dissipates and the landscape of tall dark buildings merges into the northerly stretches of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which winds, and turns, and meanders and I just keep riding my bicycle, passengers no longer there, sensuously absorbing the mixed urban and rural landscapes extending towards the horizon on all sides and before me, having very little idea where all this is going. Music by Donya Quick (Mid Night)

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