May 2021
Robert Wexelblatt
wexelblatt@verizon.net
wexelblatt@verizon.net
Bio Note: Though academic time moves quickly it can sometimes feel slow. An hour is fifty minutes,
a week four hours, a year just twenty-eight weeks. This has been a unique year, but it too has flowed both slow
and fast, and now it’s over.
I teach at Boston University so it’s not surprising that the poem below is a college teacher’s poem.
A new book of stories just out: The Thirteenth Studebaker
I teach at Boston University so it’s not surprising that the poem below is a college teacher’s poem.
A new book of stories just out: The Thirteenth Studebaker
Oneirology
For once, there were no jokes, no digressions or asides, not even one for instance. My topic was serious and I was suitably solemn. I even had notes. The lectern was walnut. The hall was full and quiet, like a movie theater without a movie. I spoke into silence. My words were silent too; yet no one cried Louder, nobody yelled Speak up! The class, all male, sat still and stiff, serious as the officers in Frans Hals’ Banquet, but without the ruffs and sashes. What was I preaching about? Danish theology? Crimes Against Humanity? The national debt? Couldn’t remember, still can’t. What I do recall is the statuesque white goddess looming right behind me, staring over my head, dour, unmoving and unmoved. The lecture was nothing. The urgent questions that woke me were: why a goddess and which one? Not Artemis—no bow. Not Aphrodite—too severe. Not Demeter—no sheaves. Not Tyche—not a bit capricious. Not Hestia—the opposite of homey. Maybe Hera—but why would she be there? No, it had to be Athena. It was. AKA Minerva. Stern, apparently disapproving, goddess at once of wisdom and of war. Was I lacking one, stumbling toward the other? Another lecture dream, a nightmare I had twice when I was in my thirties, premiere then re-release. On the lectern lay a stack of notes, single-spaced, minuscule font, paper legal-sized, the sentences turgid, Teutonic, interminable. Both times, the subjects were Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Kafka—Notes, Fear and Trembling, Metamorphosis—all three, seriatim then jumbled up. My lecture was pedantic, delivered in a pompous monotone. I read for an hour before looking up. Before me, rising in the amphitheater, rows of students, unaccountably rapt. I resumed reading for a second hour before looking up again, astonished to see the hall no less full, the same young faces still entranced. I shrugged then droned on for a third hour, voice cracking, eyes aching and squinting to make out the tiny print. The third time I looked up, I saw faces unchanged, still eager. I looked harder and saw they weren’t real faces, not real students but painted ones. Horrified, I turned toward the door that should have been on the left, to flee. But where the door had been I saw a multitude of receding halls with me at the podium. I wheeled to the right but that door too was gone, replaced by another infinity of halls with me before that uncanny trompe l’oeil. I woke in an August sweat, trapped between a brace of mirrors, between past and future. There are dreams that outstrip reality, dreams that mystify, that rise almost to the surface then plummet, dreams that tease and smirk and slip beneath the door, into the walls; amorous dreams that torment with yearning, concupiscent or sentimental. Dreams can inspire, pose and even solve conundrums as the busy brain turns on this, off that. Pharaoh’s seven cows. Paul McCartney’s Yesterday. Dmitri Mendeleev’s Table. Mary Shelley’s Monster. Elias Howe’s cannibals. One afternoon, decades back, dog-tired, I fell on my rented cot, instantly asleep and instantly dreaming. I sank through blanket, sheets, mattress, into a darkness that embraced me like some tender fate or welcome death. I was barely twenty-one. My basement room was thick with books and stale Lucky Strike smoke. Lightless depth, meaning what? Nightmares terrify, chastise, prophesy. In the prefrontal cortex, the censor dozes off, guardrails drop neglected, memory and fantasy turn feral, then there’s the bottomless abyss, the censorious Athena, the baffling mirrors, the belief in buried truths unearthed but just out of reach. For its health, the mind mandates we dream the doctors say, demands us to forge in its fires metaphors and mirages that could signify nothing, that might mean anything, everything.
Originally published in Modern Literature
©2021 Robert Wexelblatt
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