Squidmek

Attached is the trailer for David Lynch's newest film, Inland Empre. It's three hours long and it feel sas if you are quite literally stuck within a consciousness still on the liminal threshold between waking and sleeping. It's frightening and moving and confusing. The trailer alone feels like a dream. I'm reminded of an early line in the film, which revisits a theme that Lynch seems obsessed with: "From Hollywood California, where stars make dreams, and dreams make stars..."

Last night:

I'm on the front lawn of a home, not my home, nor some home I'm familiar with. I'm holding a big, red snow shovel, and it's absolutely freezing outside. I'm bundled up well, and I'm looking for snow. There is none to be seen, and I begin to scrape at the dead lawn. I'm, at times, attempting to dig beneath the dirt. I notice others doing the same, and at this time I see a sprawling suburb laid out from my driveway. As if it all starts with this house.

"Epitaph on a Tyrant"

Perfection of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And he was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
--1937

I love this poem. Like much of what I know of Auden, it is deceptively simple. It has a complex rhyme sceme that still delivers a simple rhythm as if it was composed for children to memorize: ABBCAC. Perhaps it's anapestic meter accomplishes this.
Above all, it is his word choice, his syntax, and his neutral and direct diction give the poem it's power. The first word, "Perfection," immediately informs the type of "Tyrant" this was--followed by "of a kind," reminding us of the vain pursuit that it is. Given the date and fascism's frightening rise at the time, and the fallout from WWI, Auden was rightly concerned with absolute human power and it's failings. When he cries, children die. He does not order their deaths, they are merely symptomatic of his power. The poem could very well have been structured in any number of ways. However, Auden chose an epitaph. The form suggests a respectability beyond death, regardless of the life lived, an attempt to articulate the humanity of the tyrant while critiquing the absurdity one. An epitaph allows for both.

(Last night I watched Norman Mailer on the Charlie Rose Show.)

The dream:

I just finish Mailer's new novel, The Castle in the Forest, and decide that I'm going to steal a line from it for one of my grad school personal statements (in reality I have not even begun his new book, nor my statements). I sit and write the statement, and somehow realize that I need to go visit with someone immediately. In fact, I'm already late. I'm now in the large stairwell of a parking lot, but I'm still getting dressed as if I'm in my bedroom. I'm also in the middle of a conversation with 2 women and 1 man, all of whom are trying to outsmart each other. One woman actually announces her IQ, the other woman is impressed and says so. I tell her she's being silly. She says, "Who are you anyway? And aren't you late?" I thank her and give each of them a big hug, and a kiss on the cheek. The man, however, I simply hug beacuse I'm aware that he might find a kiss on the cheek uncomfortable. But he grabs my head with both hands and kisses my forehead. I run up the stairs and realize that I'm still half-dressed in pajamas, and I cannot find my car. I see it--it's being put through a carwash. Next thing I know I'm driving down a road through what feels like Georgia, and I'm not really driving. I'm also not in the car, the car is driving itself, and the closet I can come to describing this is it's as if I were filming the whole scene from above it and I'm following the car for the entire shot. But I know that I'm in the car, and that I'm lost.