Gotham Diary:
Partiality
19 November 2013
This morning, I woke for the first time since Friday without feeling under the weather. The wear and tear of Friday’s library-management project has finally worn off. I did nothing all weekend — nothing! I sat and read. I fixed a simple meal or two. Maybe I even did a load of laundry. But nothing is pretty much all I was up to. The blue room remains just as disordered as it was when Ray Soleil and I called it a day on Friday evening — bits of discrete mess here and there, each a little problem to be solved. Bulk projects always turn up a dozen such.
I woke several times, actually, and each time I fell back to sleep, I returned to an archipelago of dreams that had an unusual weight or urgency. All I can compare this urgency to now, hours and the morning paper later, is the hypersensitivity to new people and places that attends starting at a new school. I don’t think that I should be so sensitive today, at my age, for I am too weightily settled in my own self to feel, as one does (or did) during the first couple of weeks in a strange dormitory, that absolutely everything of importance is (was) happening outside of me — and that everything that is happening is of equal importance. Even the unfamiliar now has a certain familiarity to it, which is perhaps only another way of saying that unfamiliarity itself is no longer enough to attract my attention. I have to have some reason to feel that, upon becoming more familiar, the unfamiliar will also be interesting — unlikely, in most cases, as I know from experience. I read that there are people for whom the unfamiliar is per se interesting, but I am not one of those people, evidently enough. In any case, the urgency of this morning’s dream owed to the “feeling,” or whatever it is that one has in dreams, that I had to work out just how I knew the other people in the dream, and why they were so eager to welcome and oblige me.
Waking from this dream left me with a sense of its architecture. I could not begin to describe this architecture, which was also a kind of logic, but I felt its strength, as though I were watching my mind handily push a loaded wheelbarrow across a yard. So much of what our minds do is unknown to us, or understood only in the merest fragments! It’s to be expected that we’ll know more in future; but, for now, we’re morally obliged, I think, to wait until that knowledge is secure to begin speculating on what it tells us about what’s going on beneath or behind or around our conscious selves. I have never had a dream that I could believe was “telling me something” about my own life that was otherwise invisible. I’m not sure that anyone who goes to the movies a lot has that kind of dream anymore: movies that we see when we’re awake do a much better job than our closed-off, sleeping brains can do of telling us what our lives look like to others, and of highlighting affinities of which we might never otherwise be consciously aware — hence the urgency of warning dreams before the advent of cinema. My dreams all seem to depict alternative lives, roads not taken, in most cases because they never quite forked off the route of my daily life.
“My dreams” — makes you shudder, doesn’t it? Please don’t tell me about your dream! Because you can’t. You can only report the aspect of the dream that you can remember and frame in words (two sides of the same thing). The necessary incoherence of your account will be all that you can communicate. No, there’s one other problem with dreams: they’re often quite unpleasant. My first reaction to hearing about a bad dream is to feel as sorry for the dreamer as I would had it all been real. Then I resent being made to pity the victim of purely imaginary (self-induced!) events. And, without going into detail, I must say that I dislike being libeled in someone else’s dream.
What we know, and what we don’t. The things we know are all very small. The spatulas are in the left-hand drawer. Our intestines are lined with microbes that participate in the digestive process. Oleanders are poisonous — even the smoke of burning oleander! The United States was founded in 1789, which also saw the beginning of the French Revolution. Earth is the third planet from the sun, and I forget how fast light travels but I could look it up in a jiffy. (The speed of light is profoundly meaningless to me; light is simply instant. And I know — another small thing — that this perception is “incorrect.”)
The things we don’t know are large. What is love? Might it be something slightly different for everyone who claims to have experienced it, and therefore incapable of generalization? The small things that we know about love don’t begin to add up to an explanation of the whole. Love seems to me to be a weak fact — its weakness being that nothing can be inferred from it or built upon it. It is best to take love as a miracle. As we ought to take dreams. They’re real, but their large reality is fully appreciable only to those who actually experience them.
This is not to say that love and dreams are purely private, that they have no social reality. One of the small things that we know about dreams is that a pattern of unusually vivid dreaming, followed by a cessation of dreams altogether, warrants consultation with a medical professional. Similarly, we know that people who are truly loved do not display contusions caused by the violence of their ostensible lovers. We positively bristle, as a culture these days, with myriad small facts about proper parenting — which don’t, however, explain the special love that binds parents to children, or the quite different special love that binds children to parents. Or that, sadly, doesn’t.
It used to be a humane conceit to assert that mankind is a blend of the bestial and the angelic. My updated version, which I’m sure could be put better, is that we confront a world of mysteries and miracles that we can only partially grasp in terms of sure knowledge. The first principle of any humane morality must be to respect this partiality humbly, for what it is.