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Friday, January 26, 2007

My No Legs Dream

posted by on January 26 at 10:30 AM

Last night I had a dream that began with me showing students what was wrong with postmodern architecture. Across the street from where we stood there was a building with a particularly irritating postmodern detail. I ran toward this building pointing at this detail and denouncing it. Suddenly, in the middle of the street, a milk truck (much like the one that killed Roland Barthes) ran over my legs, parting them at the knees. But because I lived in the future in this dream world, the missing lower half of my legs, from the knees down, where quickly and painlessly replaced with robot limbs. They worked great. All I had to do was hide my metallic ankles with long pants and everything was as good as before the accident with the milk truck. I used robot limbs for the rest of the dream, which had a happy ending.

Then this morning I read this. Yes, I’m spooked.

On an unrelated note, while in bed I read Yeats’ poem “The Tower” for the first time in many years and I’m now convinced that this is the most important passage ever written by any poet in the English language:

And I declare my faith:/I mock Plotinus’ thought/And cry in Plato’s teeth/Death and life were not/Till man made up the whole,/Made lock, stock, and barrel/Out of his bitter soul,/Aye, sun and moon and star, all—
Those are words to live by.

Lastly, while listening (after my shower) to Coltrane’s solo in the opening half of “Africa,” which, by the way, sounds nothing like African music but, instead, like Bernard Herrmann energized by a lot of soul power, I decided that Coltrane’s playing, his sound, his genius, has a lot in common with Plato’s chariot of the soul, with its white horse of reason and dark horse of passion. One pulls him up to the heavens, the other down to the earth. The best of Coltrane has this struggle; in his least interesting work, one or the other dominates the performance.

RSS icon Comments

1

You got new legs Lieutenant Dan!

Posted by candyqueen | January 26, 2007 10:39 AM
2

At the robotics convention at the Seattle Center this past fall there were robotic limbs... intended for amputees ...

spooky!

Posted by seattle98104 | January 26, 2007 10:40 AM
3

Damn, candyqueen beat me to it!!

Posted by caitlin! | January 26, 2007 11:02 AM
4

i love mudede's hyperbole. (i.e. "this is the most important passage ever written by any poet in the English language")

Posted by bing | January 26, 2007 11:09 AM
5

Now he's on about his dreams. Fuck, this is a new low for Charles.

Posted by chris | January 26, 2007 11:51 AM
6

stop! I had a dream last night that a doctor had to amputate and reattach one of my legs at the knee!

Posted by LH | January 26, 2007 12:09 PM
7

LH, you are either lying or making fun of me. which is it?

Posted by charles mudede | January 26, 2007 12:14 PM
8

Curiously, the night before your dream, I watched the movie, Murderball, about a group of quadriplegic rugby players, one of whom did not have any legs at all. I believe that one of them was hit by a truck..., but I doubt he was looking at architecture. In one of the scenes from the movie, the legless man hides inside a box, where he plays a trick on a woman by surprising her.

I would like to continue the analysis of the dream as though it was my own. Now before checking out the movie at the Bellevue Regional Library, I suddenly came across a book in the aisles about Malevich, a suprematist artist recently mentioned by Charles on the Stranger Blog. I flipped through the book, impressed. But what most impressed me was that one of his artworks had made the cover of a novel I recently read by Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. I decided to read on the page about how it was intened to portray the prison of reason, or something to that effect.

This takes me back to a comment I wrote on Mudede's post on Malevich, in which I essentially wrote that writing can have a possibly corrupting, derailing effect.

The interpretation of the dream, therefore, if had been mine, would indicate the guilt I may be feeling towards possibly corrupting people with my foul writing. Indeed, it was only yesterday that I deleted almost all my writing on the internet.

Posted by Dobbs | January 26, 2007 12:31 PM
9

This is going to sound crazy, but nearly all of my dreams begin with my esteemed erstwhile colleague Charles showing students what is wrong with postmodern architecture.

Posted by SEAN NELSON, EMERITUS | January 26, 2007 12:43 PM
10

neither lying OR fun making. I swear. I share a bed with a frequent reader of SLOG and if he cares to back me up, he can do so now. I woke up talking to him about the dream. The surgeon was cute and gave me good pain killers, so that kept this from being a nightmare. BUT IT'S TRUE!!!

Posted by LH | January 26, 2007 1:42 PM
11

That Coltrane metaphor is great. Man, he died too early...

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