Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Ezra Pound Dream

[I had this weird dream last night. It seems I am officially a nerd since I dream about Ezra Pound. It's also clearly influenced by Daniel Tiffany's book on Pound, Radio Corpse. But I the whole My Little Pony element of this dream is incomprehensible to me. Anyway, when I woke up I wrote this down:]

Last night I dreamt I had to explain Ezra Pound to my dad.
“Who’s this Ezra Pound,” asked my dad, feigning interest in my studies.
I felt I should explain Pound but I also did not want to because I could tell my dad was not really that interested.
So I told him: “Ezra Pound was a poet. He started out as a dandy and then he became a fascist and then he stopped writing and began working for Mussolini and then he sat in a cage.”
Miraculously we seemed to be walking through a kind of technicolor virtual reality interpretation of The Cantos. The colors were like candy and the shapes were rounded like in cartoons for girls. It was beautiful and nauseating! There were pink horses running through meadows. We were walking along the creek that ran through the woods by the house where we would spend our summers when I was a child.
I gave some brief interpretation of the events unfolding, giving some context for The Cantos. For example, I explained, "this is usury" and pointed to a glowing, Arthurian depiction of usury.
Then I noticed a dead princess in the creek. She looked very placid so I did not mind. But then I saw another and another and soon the entire creek was full of dead princesses piled up and the water was flooding the ground where we walked. We were wading through candy-pink water. It was a good thing we wore rubber boots.
“I can see why he’d want to shut himself in a cage,” said my dad in a lame attempt at a joke.
“He didn’t shut himself in. The Americans did it. They locked him in a cage and made him a contemplative sage. That’s how it works. Lock a fascist in a cage and you get a sage.”
I thought I had said something very smart but it made my dad uncomfortable. Then he said something grotesque about cages and the backyard of the house where we lived in the suburbs when we moved to the US.
This made me uncomfortable.
“Back to Pound,” I said. “The Cantos is an endless poem that is partly autobiography and partly myth and partly history. For example, he would write a poem that’s partly about going on walks with his friends and partly about Italian knights.”
At this point we see a castle.
“Funny, in my memories of childhood I don’t remember that being there,” I said. “It must be new.”
“That’s where he lives,” said my dad.
“Who?”
“Ezra Pound.”
“Why are we going to see Ezra Pound?” I asked.
“I’m not going,” said my dad. “You’re going. But be careful, he’s killed all his wives.” And then he turns and runs away.
At this point I enter a desert scene. The sand is red and covered in bones. There was no castle, no Ezra Pound, just bright sunshine and a red sand like cartoon about the wild west, and the sand was covered with bones. It was the 1950s. The bones were the bones of teenage girls.

[I think my dad's last words suggest that I'm supposed to marry Ezra Pound. The castle also looked exactly like the castle in Breillat's Bluebeard, giving more credence to this interpretation. Now that I think about it, the killing of the wives is of course from that movie. Also, I do watch a lot of children's TV, which may be why everything was very childish. But Sinead doesn't watch My Little Pony type of stuff; she prefers Zabumafoo.]

2 Comments:

Blogger Kate Durbin said...

Best dream ever.

6:40 PM  
Blogger Jeremy Stewart said...

"Lock a fascist in a cage and you get a sage"! Very quotable! I suggest you pass this along to the Annandale Dream Gazette (http://annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/). They believe that the right ("intended") audience for a dream may not be the dreamer... a delightfully paranoid premise.

8:26 AM  

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