Dream of milk and watch

 I had a gallon of milk in a backpack that I was obliged to carry around. 

***

I was buying a watch, of an old-fashioned analog kind, for about $100.  I thought it was a good idea, somehow.  

Poet in Spain

 I was looking at Sarah Arvio's Poet in Spain. I noticed that two reviews of the book (a translation of Lorca's poetry + Bodas de sangre) mention me, but she doesn't in the intro to the book or bibliography. She's translating everything except the New York poetry, it seems, in an effort to give a less American Lorca.  

She seems unaware of the complete history of Lorca translation into English.  

The intro is a little off at places. She says the sonnets are unusual because they have a strict rhyme scheme, but more of Lorca's poetry rhymes than doesn't, and the rhyme is often very regular: assonance in every other line (even numbered lines).  

She thinks the Falange started the Spanish Civil War.  I am reminded of how difficult it is to state basic facts. This was a military coup; the Falange was a small party at the time, and Franco later took it over, though he was never a member of it before then. The party was very small before the Civil War, and Franco took it over in 1937, during the war, to consolidate his own power.  

She groups the Suites into other groupings, along with other poems that are not part of the Suites, creating her own Lorca sequences. This seems weird to me.  

I'm not going to nit-pick with translations any more, because it seems that the process is exhausting without leading to much substance. A few well-chosen examples go a long away.  

I was in a restaurant and couldn't help overhearing a conversation

 One guy was an older man, a composer, and he was telling another slightly younger fellow: "I used to tell my students, when I write a score it is like writing a personal letter to each musician..."  The other guy, also a musician, was telling him that his [older man's'] scores were so carefully notated that the musicians just had to play the music as written and the music would be 90% right already (something like this).  

I still have it!

 I still have it.  (I still have "it.") I went to the library and just sat there writing and researching for 3 hours, from 9-12, yesterday and today. Retirement is freeing me up.  I can write as well as ever; the ideas flow. I have supreme confidence in what I am doing.  

Part of what I am doing is eliminating things. Students, colleagues, administrators, have no more demands on me.  I am unsubscribing from everything imaginable. I looked at my retirement privileges: I have full access to library, can park for less money, and even have a grave sit in the University Cemetery--hopefully not very soon. I have plenty of money.  

I am giving some books and cds away.  I might sell some books, not because I need the money, but because they are too valuable to simply donate to the library.  

While I am not technically retired, since I am doing the Barcelona program in July, I am living the lifestyle. The missing element seemed to be very simple: going to the library and working. Why the library? That is where the books are.  I simply sit down at a desk near the Lorca section, PQ6000 and whatever. I have my own books too to supplement the holdings of the library, a collections of books by and about Lorca that I have been collecting for 20 years.  

I plan to be more productive now, keeping a regular schedule, M-F from 9-12. I will go to the regular library and to the music library, depending on what project I am working on.  

Dreams are garbled fables

We talk about intention, what the author meant to say. When I have a dream, the process is involuntary. I might be exercising my will in the dream, trying to do something, but the construction of the narrative itself, and the meaning of the dream, are not the result of an act of volition. I can interpret the dream, but even having access to the author (myself) I cannot be sure I am right, or what even being right means. In retelling the dream I can give it shape, a contour that represents it. I never want to massage it until it is a perfect little fable, when in reality it is a garbled mess--as it should be.  

2 Dreams

 1. I had gone through some wilderness mash-up in which the parts of my body had been switched with one another or other objects, while I was lost for a long time. I was trying to make sense of the duration of the experience. What I thought was 3 hours could have been 3 years.  

2. There was a little girl, maybe 8, confined to a room in a zoo, though not close to other animals or in an animal habitat. It was in a basement of a building, though in the context of the dream I knew it to be the zoo.  

She asked for help from another person, then from me. She wanted to escape. I knew the people ostensibly responsible for her, for this situation, though not parents. I attempted to find their number in my phone to text them, and promised the girl I would resolve the problem. I stayed there a while, without entering the room, until she went to sleep. The only name I could think of was Bob Cranshaw or Crenshaw, the bass player who played with Sonny Rollins for years. (Sonny died yesterday!!), so I could not text the "Bob" in question.  

Now I was with the "Bob" that was responsible for the girl. We were doing something else together and I thought it was fortunate I had found him. I laid down the law to him, gravely but not with any anger, in a way he could not argue against. I said something about child protective services. I had resolved the situation.  

***

The dreams are about care of self and care of others. Bob is not Bob, but another version of myself. 

Poem I wrote awake in bed in the middle of the night

 

I want the least grief possible--

I said to myself, in my confusion, error, or stupidity.

Is it a gift I can refuse, a price to negotiate? 

With whom, exactly, would I make this deal?