On Dreams-
Surrealist Midwestern painter John Wilde allegedly said, (and I am paraphrasing) that the purpose of his paintings was to excavate his dreams.
Renowned anthropological hack Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that the purpose of myths was to allow humans to simultaneously embody and resolve paradoxes. (One of his only good takes.)
So, to embody contradiction – coherently – one must embrace surrealism. This is my thesis and my starting point in this historical moment. It’s how I feel anyway, given that I am detached from reality, and so everybody. Can the surreal heal?
My objective with this piece is to superimpose and to braid my intuition @ a center, with the disorder and crying I feel on the periphery always. Yeats has a cool poem that works through this, but I’m doing it in narrative. The narrative is based on two back-to-back dreams I had.
It’s also very possible that I wrote this out of spite, which might explain why it’s more cogent than other things I’ve written recently.
On Function-
I aim to maintain a critical stance on the function of literature.
Basically, I think writing is an exercise in inhabiting the possible, and there’s a labor in imagining a different world that I think is important. I am SICK of stories that punish as premise and doubly punish by negating the possibility of a different future. Obviously I am no post-humanist (yet.) (see above statement on detachment.)
Anyway, at this point I’ve set myself up for a story that’s a lot cooler than what I can pull off yet, but that’s my vision.
As before, there’s a bibliography @ the end. Note: this is less of a direct-citation bibliography and more of a books-that-got-me-good bibliography.
cdzhouse 