A Bag Full Of Un-Cut Diamonds Hidden In My Suitcase
August 22, 2010 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
There has been silence in my personal blogosphere because my son has been very sick this past week. He’s still not feeling well, but things are a little closer to normal, so I will take a moment to report on another fine dream I had last week. As you might recall, a week before that, I was grappling with the dilemna of how to create an interesting piece of art with only dull white buttons to work with. Well, this dream is a lot shinier and much more promising:
I was out somewhere in some sort of a loose group setting in a community of acquaintences, although we each shuttled around alone a lot, within that setting. Actually, it was just like traveling the world with a group of semi-strangers, all of us carrying backpacks or suitcases and staying in hostels.
I had gone to a bank in one of the cities and taken out the contents of my safety deposit box. Or possibly, I had inherited the contents of someone else’s safety deposit box. I remember that the woman bank teller helping me, began to suddenly let me know how poor she was and how much her family needed money, the moment she saw what I was taking out of the deposit box. It was a clear, plastic mesh sack of uncut diamonds, each about the size of a large lime. They looked like clear glass baubles, not at all like the valuable things they were purported to be. There were ten of these lime-sized uncut diamonds and holding them in their see-through sack made me think of the many times in a grocery store when I had carried fruit in exactly this way. Except, that no one else would ask me for one of them as this bank teller was doing in her desperation for ready cash brought on by the sight of such a poundage of diamonds.
I thought about giving her one, but I never encourage the act of begging. However, it tipped me off to the likely reaction of others, if they should learn what I was now carrying around with me. I had to cross some field, dragging my suitcase and a pile of other stuff, in the course of our travels. In the hostel dorm sleeping room, I had to leave my diamonds behind in the suitcase when I came and went. This ownership was already inconvenient, because it was necessary to remain aware of my responsibility to protect these diamonds-in-the-rough and get them where they needed to go.
I wondered if, somehow, the others knew about the changed value status of my baggage and I felt vaguely sure that they did. Had the teller told them, perchance? Even so, I was extremely nonchalant with my stuff, only concealing the bag’s contents with a towel casually thrown across the top, figuring that they wouldn’t exactly suspect that I had diamonds with me. Who in the world would just happen to think of such a thing, in the middle of a group trip?
This sack of glass limes was a worriesome thing to me and I never quite got around to translating that into a mental picture of all the ease and luxury that they could, eventually, buy for me. I do remember shuffling through my mental roll-a-dex trying to figure out who to take them to for whatever operation came next. Where does an amateur start? Who would one get to cut such valuable objects? How do you know who to trust?
Maybe all these books I’m churning out are my “glass limes,” my diamonds-in-the-rough? My third book will go to the printer soon and then I will prepare the others, which are already written. Right now, only my friends and family know about them, because I can’t stop publishing long enough to do any marketing. So, they’re essentially hidden in my suitcase being dragged across the field.
Maybe I’m the Diamond-Cutter and that’s what I’m doing right now???
My Un-Button-Downable Mind
August 13, 2010 by rtwsenior · Leave a Comment
My last post mentioned a recent remote Chiropractic diagnosis and treatment, when the doctor was in Hawaii and I was here in Florida, but I could feel his arrival and departure and the movement of his mind and hands during the hour he was with me. I was told to watch for dreams that might bubble to the surface in the weeks ahead, to see if they contained any cryptic commentary upon my life. I did have a funny one which I will share with you here:
When I first woke, I dismissed the dream as dull and unimportant, but then I realized that it was a comment on nonconformity. I lived in New York city and was loosely-attached to a group of thirty-somethings, all roughly my age. We attended a well-established art center where the whole idea was to draw buttons. Nothing else, only buttons… the potential models of which were displayed all over the walls, stuck on pins. Before we sat at the long, open tables with our sketch paper, we were to select our model buttons and bring them to our place and proceed to make art.
The trouble was that they were all bland and white, mostly large, but with no distinctive features. Just plain white buttons. Everyone else would get happily to work, but I spent lots of time at the wall trying to figure out how to use this dull conglomeration creatively. Maybe shading? But there were no uneven surfaces to create shadows. I remember trying to include a bumpy pebble to jazz up the composition, but somehow, that was scotched by the woman in charge.
The only sketching that ever took place for me was in my mind, wondering how I could apply my minimal artistic skills to create something interesting with such terribly limited material; especially since the whole group was working with exactly the same buttons, day after day, year after year.
None of them complained or even seemed to notice that there was a problem. In fact, they loved the ease and simplicity of the assignment and cheerfully spent their entire time concentrating upon an exact rendering of their chosen button, or buttons; while I spent my entire time merely trying to find something to work with.
It all came to a head one day, when we were sitting at lunch together at a long table. I was at one end and the owner of the art clinic was at the other. All the happy-camper women were sitting along either side. With no criticism in mind, I asked the woman in charge how anyone could draw an interesting picture with such dull, limited material for models. I was taken aback by her attitude, which was to lean towards me with venom in her eyes and say, “Well, if you don’t like it, you can just get out, right now!”
I don’t think I left. Perhaps I really didn’t have that option, as I needed to remain with these other women; but I returned to the task of trying to come up with something worthy of drawing, knowing that I would get no help from the leader and also knowing that I had now stepped on her toes by attacking her own life’s work, and she would have none of it or of me. Neither she, nor the others, even saw the inherent limits.
When I was telling this dream to Randy, my son, he immediately understood the underlying comparison to much of what passes for meaningful life in the outside world. He remembered attending church with his dad, hearing exactly the same words, week after week and going through the same motions. Sometimes, even the “original” sermon sounded canned, like a dull button being pulled off the wall and used again and again. Hymns were chosen from the same book and seeded into the cookie-cutter services all year long, ad infinitum. And yet, the congregation never complained, or thought to complain, and even became defensive when anyone suggested that there could be more to a spiritual life.
Any independent thinker, stuck in this sort of a society, is reduced to bleak frustration, picking through the selection of nothing-special, hoping to eventually find some way to be creative. This dream could apply to anyone stuck in a dull marriage, a dull job, a dull diet, a dull town, a lack of education and many more immovable, unimaginative, life situations. Such dreamers could become, deep within their hearts, the non-conformist who knows that there surely is more than this to life. They long to find a way to express the creativity that begs to be released from their own inner self.
They really don’t mind the button-lovers. But they are so desperate to know that there are others like themselves out there in the wider world. If only they will act upon the slit-eyed advice and walk out of that buttoned-down art center forever, they might just bump into like-minded souls and find a whole universe full of interesting subjects to sketch.
