The baseline for coordinates

Earlier here, we have been asking what kind of observations, what kind of parameters, one uses in order to deduce where one is in a dream. Of course very often the actual dream landscapes are created using scraps of several different locations from memory, and the actual spatial semaphors (signs signalling where one is) used might relate to just one of these, or several – or just additional signs added without being based in the biographical landscapes the dream landscape is built upon (an example: there is the devil so I must be in hell; or, there is a sign saying Mogadishu so I must be in Somalia). But often, these spatial semaphors can be secondary to the immediate knowledge of where one is, if the location is part of the explicit execution of the dream. This immediate knowledge might also contain a delimitation against places where it's not, and it may either coincide with, take sides among, or entirely contradict, what the spatial semaphors are saying. The little dream I'll be relating is just a small example of this more general observation based on a larger dreaming experience. And furthermore, it starts nicely with a spatial metaphor getting a material expression.

As the conclusion of a long dream of idiotic joking, self-aggrandising, and amorous complications, I'm feeling frustrated over the whole mess, and in order to be able to get an overview, I take my bulldog and start climbing the steep hills of the little town. The bulldog is huge, with a spike collar and an enormous mouth; it is Maldoror's bulldog. The inclination is just like a Norwegian city (Narvik or so), but the vegetation is nemoral and the buildings are English; anyway I don't need to interpret such signs because I know I am in Greenwich, and I feel a certain need to emphasise that this is of course not Greenwich Village, New York, but the real Greenwich, the starting point of all coordinate systems.

/MF

Watch out for the pelican council

On the childhood island, I want to take a bath, or I am just convinced that the water is a good place to be, but it is frustrating that the main jetty points to the northeast, which means that when standing in the water next to it, spying out eastwards, one is standing in the shade and it gets cold. I'm standing there anyway.

A coot comes swimming towards me, and I notice common coots are beautiful birds. The next bird is a grebe, calmly sailing by me very close, and I'm thinking it's a good thing with the shade after all, when I stand there rather immobile I become like a heron and form a part of the general environment. When the grebe passes it changes, grows bigger and darker, eventually it becomes a cormorant.

I am standing there in immobility and shade. Around mere there are huge birds, continuously and diffusely uttering a low uninspired cackling, indolently yet threatfully, like when one has to make way through a crowd of lazy large gulls occupying the jetty. I thought these birds were cormorants, but they are actually even bigger and have very long beaks; they are pelicans!

A small company of my relatives comes down to the beach, and walk out into the water next to me. It makes me angry, the pelicans won't stay calm; pelicans smell so bad, and they can be so aggressive, they will raise hell for this. But my relatives have a strange ability, in their resolute hostility, to drive the pelicans in front of them, they are just swimming away, towards the northwest in the strait. A beautiful cousin forms the rearguard, she is somehow the prisoner of the others, at least she can express her dissent by keeping her distance while slowly walking through the water. I keep her company, and tell her about the danger of the pelicans, but it is so pleasant so I'm thinking that if I could wade through life with her I could stand the pelican smell. Cormorants do smell worse after all.

/MF

Towards the Tintin gate

/.../ The important thing about Tintin City is that you get there through a particular epistemological break, which is called the "Tintin Gate". The Tintin Gate is the centerpiece in a new school of mysticism, the prophet of which I will now become. The fact that I am now homeless will make it difficult for me to get into the restaurants to have breakfast and convince the tourists, but of course many other prophets have been poor and ragged creatures too. Perhaps someone will lend me a bike, and I can bike around and eventually find someone who offers me breakfast. I will have a yellow robe, and I will know six different words for snowball, this is very important.

After other adventures, in a commuter train stopping halfway between stations, I open my computer as a book and read about life in sunken Atlantis. I am somehow struck between the similarities of social and architectural organisation between Atlantis and Tintin City, and I get very enthusiastic when I read that the most holy artifact in Atlantis is the "smoking heart of motherhood", a piece of ember issuing a long trail of bubbly smoke that looks like the seaweed forming the long hair of a medusahead. This is obviously analogous to the state of things on the other side of the Tintin Gate. There are engravings illustrating all of this, with pastoral lovers running around performing strange rituals in underwater ruins (the engravings look like 18th century post-alchemical preromantic mystic christianity emblems rather than actual alchemical allegories).

/MF