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Extract from a Poem in Progress

Dreamed c.1972, written 1982 by D.M. Thomas

...I fell in love with love and poetry.
A dream, from ten years back, has stayed with me.
I was in Truro Cathedral, listening
To a dreadful woman-pianist called Lees;
But then the Bishop announced that she was not
Called Lees, but Orchard, an illegitimate
Daughter of a shop-girl from Canterbury

And T.S. Eliot. The fingers at the keys
Which had been lumpish, amateurish, frightful,
Shaightway became expressive, light, delightful...
I thought about my dream. I knew Miss Lees--
A lumpish student of mine; the other name
The improvisatore of my dream
Had plucked, like Truro Cathedral, from my youth

In Cornwall; Audrey Orchard, a soprano.
"Pianist" is penis, I guess: hence, sex and art
Were blended--dregs at first, then bearing fruit.
When the performer proved to be a bastard
Of Eliot, the arch-conservative,
And a poor, humble girl, the dry bones live,
Winter turns into harvest, the piano

Pure as Marina... What images return,
O my daughter... Murder in the Cathedral... I
Had the dream analysed--a single hour
With an old Jungian. I didn't learn
Much from John Layard that I didn't know
Already; but he said cathedrals were
The mother's body that we must outgrow.

But what the dream was really telling me,
Elizabeth, was that--in love and art--
I had to choose the illegitimate.
"Cleave to the illegitimate," he said,
"And you won't go far wrong." I do: in bed
With common shop-girls, and in poetry,
I guess, more freely now my mother's dead...

SOURCE: Dreamworks: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly (v.3, no.1, fall 1982, p.4)

EDITOR'S NOTE

Thomas knows his Freudian and Jungian dream interpretation; his best-known novel The White Hotel (1981) has Sigmund Freud treating a woman with psychosomatic illness and eerie dreams of a white hotel. Doctor and patient are equally unaware they're premonitions of the Holocaust. Black black humor, but one of the best critiques of Freud's limitations. So I was startled to see just that sort of dogmatic interpretation in the poem: Jungian, in the equation Truro Cathedral=womb=mom (not, say, childhood, religion, patriarchy, the past or architecture; and Freudian, in pianist=penis=sex, not, say, performing/interpretive art (in contrast to Thomas's and Eliot's solitary creative art), or practice versus innate talent...

But then I play keyboard, and struggle for dexterity, and see it wax and wane with my health not with practice... just as I too interpret my own dreams psychologically, only to find later they were literal and predictive.

Not that I disagree with the old Jungian's advice: "Cleave to the illegitimate and you won't go far wrong."

--Chris Wayan

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