Waiting for Godot Department

I dreamt last night that angels were wrapping me in newspaper though they were quick to reassure me I wasn't dead. One of the angels who looked like Eleanor Roosevelt said that I was a man of letters and that wrapping me in newspapers was the best way to transport me. Dreams of course have their own currents and I didn't get to inquire where they might be taking me. I remember thinking that the 19th century French poet Stephan Mallarme said that the newspaper was fit only to wrap fish in. (He was distinguishing "the news" from poetry.) I wondered if maybe I had turned into a fish. Had the angels been hiding something from me?

But dreams of course have their own insistences. Sometimes I think that dreaming is like the childhood learning curve one experiences if you grew up along the ocean. You grow comfortable sailing in a small bay; then you're suddenly out on the sea. The big ocean doesn't care a whit about your navigational prowess. You're just taken by larger forces.

So my angels bundled me up in the daily news and then before I knew it I was in a field somewhere. I was standing along a dirt road. I was simply standing there. I thought about the story of Beckett's play and how he came to name it. One is simply waiting by a roadside for a bicyclist to appear. His name is Godot. Life is just that simple and is equally divided between meaning and meaninglessness. How the rational mind hates this!  Things must have hieratic meanings, even symbolism. The Victorian doctors who wanted to reform the conditions in mental hospitals had to come up with a taxonomic system for madness in order to render it treatable as opposed to thinking of it as an inalienable fact. And so the modern mind has invented symbolism and its thousand analytical variants from Freudianism to post-analytic philosophy and French deconstruction.

Ah but dreams resist all of it. I was in a field and waiting for spring and some angels had left me there with ink stains on my body. Why not?

S.K.  

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto