THAT DAY

I work on the World Dream Bank all morning: take and lay in photos of my hypnogogic sculpture Bed Vortex (left).

My poet-friend Patagia calls. We haike around McLaren Park--duck pond, geese, turtles. Walking back, an idiot nearly causes a 3-car crash.

On the way home, stop at the ATM, the grocery, the library. A blonde teen with sexy face, bare belly, short skirt and long tan thighs, stepping graceful as a deer, is everywhere I go--getting cash, groceries, books... But she ignores me, mom by her side. Sigh!

Home frustrated. Crawl into bed with Ailura, my giant furry hand-sewn catgirl. Imagine I'm a cat too, and rock until I come.

Get up refreshed. Listen to Jayne Entwhistle read The Dead in their Vaulted Arches. As Flavia de Luce meets and disapproves of her precocious little cousin--an uncomfortable mirror to her own precocious little self--something nags me. Takes an hour to come conscious: Entwhistle also read Virginia Woolf's part in Priya Parmar's Vanessa And Her Sister. The only two audiobooks I've heard Entwhistle in, and both are about gifted siblings with weak/absent parents--the fictional de Luces, the very real Bells (core of the Bloomsbury Group).

I like to hear of gifted, neglected sibling-sets--since I grew up in one. It's not a common pattern. In fiction you mostly hear about sibling rivalry. Alien to me! You can't afford rivalry if siblings are all you've got--when adults are unreliable. Or dead.

As Jayne Entwhistle talks, I sew on Vixtoria, my giant furry sculpture/plushie of a fox-taur: reshape her throat, neck, and thorax. Next I need to slim her forelegs. The faux foxfur I got is long and will visually fatten the legs, so I gotta trim the armature way down...

THAT NIGHT

I'm wandering the site of a circus, Circ Cervine, before they've opened. Tents up, but still trucks unloading. Dancers in sequined trapeze outfits practice their routines on parked floats and trucksbed. I walk the aisles between floats, looking up. Some are human, some are gracile centauroids, more deerlike than equine, though longtailed. Real--though some human girls are costumed as centaurs, and vice versa!

I stop at a float with a striking tableau. Two bipedal girls with deer legs, mare-tails... no, one has a loose head! Just a realistic mannequin. Deeriquin? Yet the other's living, real, a doe-eyed dancer. A third figure, human, living, is trying a headstand squeezed between them--they help support her, but her arms and hair are tangled in their legs and hooves. Looks simultaneously intimate and... awkward.

I try sketching them, feeling like it's symbolic--the Three Graces, one a deer, one a human yoga nut, one plastic! That's got to mean something... doesn't it?

But I get stuck, drawing. On the page, reduced to two dimensions, I just can't show the headstander so she makes visual sense--she seems behind both or in front, not between. Or even a later sketch superimposed, accidentally upside down, not with them at all. I erase the headstander. But the two alone, doe and deeriquin, look slightly empty--the doe looking at the hole where her friend (lover?) got erased. Censored. By a dream-artist lacking the technique to clearly render someone upside down and tangled...

The story of this transhuman circus is now a graphic novel being presented in the big hall by its authors. A publication party, or is this at a comics con? The fancy multimedia presentation ends with live dancers. Mere deer masks, though. All human, sigh!

The book's art is quite sexy--way better than my sketches. I want a copy, but see none for sale at the book table--is it out yet? So I sketch & note the names instead, so I'll can buy it later. The writer is R. Greystoke. See the artist's name too, but forgot (nearly lost Greystoke). The working title is long & forgettable; don't even try to recall it, since I'm sure it'll change for publication. Too clumsy to be final. Kind of like my dream art...

I sketch-map the circus I wandered early in the dream, before it all retreated to a not-quite-published book. The site was a long wedge of meadow; in one corner all was circles, from round cafe tables to round raised stages. Other corners have squares or hexagons...

Why sketch when I'm not nearly as good as the comic-artist? Am I just cheap? No, it's more. I half-sense it's a dream, that even if I can buy a review copy, I won't get to keep the book--when I wake, only my own dream notes will survive.

All I get to keep of their strange beauty is what I can render--poor echo though it is.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Lost book: I read late into the night. The phone rang, distracted me. Returned to my book--but it was gone! Searched, failed, went to sleep. At dawn, the book's in plain sight on my bed. Slept with it right on top of me, yet couldn't see or feel! My body forced my brain to quit... & sleep.
• Greystoke: Tarzan's English title is Lord Greystoke. The Tarzan mythos, like my dream, offers artists both animal and human figure-drawing--though butch, where my dream's femme.
• Sexy furs: Ailura, finished soft-sculpture, and Vixtoria, unfinished?
• Can't render fully, for the 3D reality's too dense for a 2D medium: dreams! Strange content, raising complex issues you'd often rather not face. Dreams, surrealism, fantasy and scientific illustrations, being rich in unexpected sights, require clear rendering. In contrast, the familiar (humans, houses, hills or hamburgers) need only be sketched, evoked, and may be stylized freely--for recognizable will do! Samuel Delany pointed out it's not just the artist whose style must adapt; you can't read nonrealist art with a realist eye, any more than you can skim poetry as if it's news. The unfamiliar is denser--more to process. Slow down, think, focus! Against our phone-trained habit.
• The deergirl, upside-down human girl, and loose-headed deer-mannequin: the Three Graces? I'm not sure. Maybe (wild guesses here)...
  1. Deergirl: the living experience of the dream, weird and wonderful
  2. Headstander: the memory of the dream when awake--humanized a bit? wobbly? and why upside-down? Don't think it meant "misinterpreting, getting it backward"--the headstand was no error but an acrobatic achievement--her deer friend gave her support. Under-standing the dream? The dream certainly supports you in that, wants you to master that trick...
  3. Deeriquin: later artistic representation of the dream--what I can convey to strangers! Plastic, a model only, lifeless and brainless, just giving you the external shape. Sigh! But it's something to lean on.
• An alternate reading of the Three Graces:
  1. Headstander: me, the human artist, wobbily trying to do an acrobatic trick--render otherworldly dreams.
  2. Deergirl: the dream's spirit, actively supporting the artist--wanting to be understood, conveyed... on stage.
  3. Deeriquin: artifice! Art-skills. Merely mechanical, yet nearly as helpful a support as the living dream.
  Well, either way...

Without that sketching inside REM, I think all would've been lost. Drawing within my dreams made me recall the figures' complex entanglement well enough to render at least a deeriquin of the dream for you. And me.

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