Last week, I finished an excellent 10-week poetry workshop led by the incredible Zoe Tuck. It was a workshop on dreams and writing. What made the class particularly extraordinary for me was the curation of reading and watching materials and Zoe’s capacity to create a beautiful container.
Containers
What is a container? This is a metaphysical question. What does a container do? This is a political question. How can we make a more quality container? This is an aesthetic question. I bought a domain in June called qualitycontainers.io (ig:qualitycontainersio). I did not plan this flow of sentences - to start with Zoe and end with this random website I bought. The words just flowed; they came out like images in a dream.
Gifts
Zoe’s class was a gift, a birthday gift, from someone dear to my heart. What can gifts do? That is my political self speaking. Gifts are political and transformative. The subversive in me almost put a photo of the Trojan horse. Inspired by David Graeber and others, I imagine a gift economy of mutual ‘indebtedness.’ But in such a society, we do not think in terms of ledgers, of owed and being owed, in the language of debt - of constant justification. Instead, we have a new language, a language of care. I imagine an economy of mutual generosity. That is sort of like a dream; I describe it in sentences.
Sentences
I started this piece with Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences on my mind. I reread this a few times in a weightless state without orientation. Then, I began to find gravity. I began experiencing how the words were generated from other words and images and how they all grew together. I felt an x-ray vision of how the piece was constructed and how sentences are like buildings.
Almost every line starts with ‘These,’ mostly ‘These sentences.’ On the opposite pages of the text, there are drawings. The sentences anticipate a future state - these are “Plans” after all. There is something of La Monte Young here, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Does the drawing come first or the sentence? Wrong Question? They are in a dance, a co-creation, a dialectic, a garden - these are all different paradigms/epistemes/metaphysics that make different politics possible. Can politics change metaphysics and erase metaphysics? Can we live between the reality tunnels? That is the system poetics.
Dreams
Only four people come to class. The classroom is filled with paper. I look for a paper to grade - Jordana’s - but cannot find it. I am at 10 Corso Corso in Milan. I see a hungry caterpillar. It is enormous, as big as my fist. I do not kill it. I am in my childhood bedroom. It looks different. There is a bunk bed, my bunk bed, and we are in the little bed, cuddling and talking with our clothing on and our legs intertwined. We are both wearing blue jeans.
All dreams are in the present. They all use gerunds. They all happen suddenly or strangely or differently or only. They do not happen - the adverb lays our expectations bare. They are not grand visions, but shock at how things are. We expect something different, but what is is glorious.
In waking life, the particulars appear unreal. Lets call this the dream qualia. Do I really see a blue jean in my dream? Do I see blue and consider it to be jeans? Tomorrow, I will record a blue jay, bluebell, the sky, or the ocean. From this perspective, it is all a dream; the blue is the metaphysics and the blue jean is the politics.
The person who dreams they are a butterfly and the butterfly who dreams they are a person.
Endnote
“Hands prepare the fire, they flounder in paste and pigment, distribute all but blindly the drops, the clusters, the spots, the fields.” Jean-Francoise Lyotard on Sam Francis 2 Sulfers 1979.