I have a (Cretan) dream

399rho


April 13, 2004: this little book, whose real-life blurriness is faithfully preserved in the above picture, receives its first entry. The subject is one Theodore (or Theodrin, or Theoden, or Theops, or Theoprecedesthep, or perhaps simply Theo, after all; no one is quite sure) Tokopoulos, a man of my invention whose name is based on that of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known as El Greco. I was thinking about El Greco, I remember, because of a scene in Nabokov’s Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle that refers to El Greco’s painting “The Cretan Dream” in the context of a bizarre love triangle being described not emotionally but spatially, yea, geometrically, i.e., as an actual triangle.

April 27, 2006: Two years and two weeks later, the same little book (having lain fallow, with Below Dunster, for 399) receives its last entry, something about halving infinity, which had to do, in the middle of the night, with—guess whom—El Greco. The middle-of-nightness, the evolution of the El Greco theme, and the conviction that, of all the things that are tough to do, “picking up steam” must be one of the toughest (keeps slipping through your fingers), inspired and formed the skeleton of a c-cough whose eventual form can be seen in the next post.

Another dream during the same night involved a game of trilingual Scrabble (in English, French, and Russian, though I do not speak the latter) in which Lucette’s KREMLIN was disallowed not for being a proper name but for having been coined by a Frenchman—apparently at this stage that man’s language had faded out of the dream and the game. Thus a kickball entered, under my own boot and in reverse (yes, spheres can roll in reverse) a vermin-trapping cage of the kind in which I saw a raccoon perish in an Oregon barn when I was Lucette’s age; this time, though, the scene was the edge/bank (Lat. ripa) of Hogwarts Lake with the ghost of Ada still hovering about as Snape (my best mate) approached asymptotically, never fully to arrive. The whole thing, I tenderly recall, transpired to a soundtrack of the trance hit “Revelation” by 4 Strings.

You can tell this dream is authentic because the made-up kind always make sense. They are symbolic to the max, fraught with Potterian plainness and receiving a facile denouement later in the tale. Such dreams do not make it Below Dunster.