This could be awkward, but hello. You would never be able to understand me directly. We are not of the same species, you and I, and so far, we remain unintelligible to one another. Yet, it may be that dreams are where we can arrange a bit of a rendezvous. I am the seahorse in this poor man’s head, the film editor, as he says. I am a hard thing to pin down. I do not use language per se, you see, images are my idiom, dreams. There is another world inside your own head, a world you do not fathom, a gateway to the knowledge of who you are and why you live, a place where you are known better than you know yourself. Do you shudder in awe at the concept of a thirty thousand foot mountain? Or a thirty thousand foot ocean trench? They are as nothing compared to the human mind in all its heights and depths. So come with me.
The subject here is a white male, of the American East Coast. Born in the era after World War II, which already speaks volumes about his aims, tastes and approach to life. He has been around long enough to amass dense hemispheres of experience, the big masses in him throbbing with the lopsidedness of success and failure, love and hate, art and fact, zeal and sloth. His is a big rambling life (maybe) and he has a hunger for adventure (on a certain scale). How things do twirl in that mind of his, outside of his awareness.
All of this is fodder for my art: his thoughts past present and future, his choices, his biases, his habits, his addictions, his beliefs, his innermost fears, all presented to you tipped, as it were, in dream, so that you might distill a memoir, abstruse as it may be, a portrait of this man.
You will learn, as well, that in this fourth dimension the seahorse can dance a jig and burn a house to the ground.
First a table of contents so that you may see what is coming.
Then a small introduction to the dream factory. Enjoy.
Thus spake the seahorse.
First, the reminder that we all have a seahorse nested in our brains; now, in the preface to his seminal work, mine speaks to you–about me. He presents himself as the usher in a movie theater, bidding you with his flame-throwing eyes to a seat down in front where you should enjoy the show. He is rolling the film across his eyes. He teases you with a bit of bio (how dare he call me a subject?!), which, I suppose, I will call fair, as he knows far more about me than I do myself. He is an artful stalker, that is for sure, able to decipher me from his perch somewhere between consciousness and sub-consciousness, between dream and reality, between living and dying.
He claims to track the grooves of my existence, this little dictator, and then he spices it up, tips it with dream so that you may slowly discern a portrait of me. He calls his work art. He speaks of a dream factory and the fouth dimension. He says he can burn a house down and dance a jig.
I wonder if he wants a cut of the royalties…
More installments forthcoming.
