One of my favorite authors, PHILIP K. DICK....was constantly obsessed with the substance of reality...WHAT IS REAL?
I have had experience with this myself....One of my earliest "memories" is of me, with a large red lollipop standing outside a white picket fence, with a gate and a white wooden archway over it....And while I know that the place exists (see STREET VIEW)...I feel like the memory may have been a dream or something I made up....(a "long" and uninteresting story...).
THEN there is a "memory" I have that I have no clue about whatsoever:
when I was a kid there was this street going up to FRIENDSHIP PARK in my home town of SAN PEDRO, CALIFORNIA, and in front of one of those houses on this drive was a WELL (click on STREET VIEW). It's STILL there, though the place is totally renovated and lacks any of the character it had then....(I know it is still there thanks to GOOGLE MAPS- WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO SPY ON YER OLD CHILDHOOD TOWN VIA SATELITE AND STREET MAPS...it's cool too, because as you move down the streets the weather changes, and sometimes there are construction crews where you know there aren't any...(when I am searching NYC streets...) as some of the pictures were taken at different times, or updated))... I later discovered it was a FAKE WELL, but by then it had already, for some reason, lodged itself in my mind, and I had already imaged all sorts of possibilities for what lay at it's bottom...(I don't know WHY wells intrigue me but they do...)...And it is as a result of this memory that another one exists...
I have an image of a JESTER sitting at the bottom of THAT well....I think...and I seemed to remember him being rather sulky about it...(SEE IMAGE AT TOP, FOR MY QUICK SKETCH OF THIS, AS WELL AS I CAN REMEMBER IT...).
Now, there were a bunch of odd animated movies during my childhood in the seventies and the eighties...like THIS ONE....and THIS ONE (one of my favorites!). And I am unsure if maybe my jester inhabited one of these strange films, glimpsed on a gloomy saturday afternoon....
Alternately, it may have been a dream I had...(though it seemed like a movie....I can almost see the animated colorful style)....as dreams have a way of being utterly convincing....
Recently, I had a dream in which I was stuck in an elevator, and the cable snapped and it began to sway and lurch dangerously....And this somehow triggered, I think, this older memory for some reason- (the mind is a mystery)- of which I had completely forgotton..And it is just as much of a mystery as it was then...
I don't think I shall ever know what the truth is about it...but it has been shouldering it's way into my work...or rather the image of a well, has continued to fascinate me for some reason that I don't know either....
I'm not sure I really WANT to know the truth...For it has grown into something bigger than this one small memory can contain....and something about it is pleasing to me...reassuring....ANCHORING...so does it really matter...?
In a way, this JESTER, down a well, sitting there...sulking...or waiting to be let out....or just...representative of my subconscious....has BECOME a reality to me: When you live with something long enough inside your head, who's to say it ain't real....?
3 comments:
I remember both those houses, John. The one on Averill...I used to walk around San Pedro at night, for hours and hours, I need to be in motion when I think, which is why I "rocked" as a child, then walked and walked, and now I drive. Annie Proulx once said she does most of her "writing" while driving...but anyway, I had these long skeins of vivid images triggered by whatever I was seeing, like videos with animation in them. I probably sound like a total weirdo, but anyway, the house on Averill used to have a white wrought iron fence, and more iron railings on the balconies. It sounds like the Garden District, but it was more Home Depot Garden Department. One night on one of my rambles--it was warm out, moths flittering in the greenish light from the street lamps, the sort of night I would have described as "seamy" in the overbaked prose of my adolescence. One one of those balconies was a low-watt yellow bulb, and that little touch was enough to make you think you [i]were[/i] in the Garden District. One of the shabbier side streets. maybe, but you could imagine Blanche Dubois listening to records on a back porch.
The other house I remember because you could see it from our backyard. I never noticed it until they redid it, in that terra cotta stucco that was so popular in the 80s. I thought it made the place look all glamorous, like inside were white overstuffed sofas looking out on a view of Catalina. How boring it is up close. And I remember that well, too, though I had forgotten what house it was in front of. I just remembered it was somewhere along that street. Never looked down it either--I was such an obedient child, I was terrified to step on someone else's lawn, so I never looked. It was probably full of garbage!
I THINK I LOOKED....but it was like discovering that you couldn't walk no the clouds...WHAT A LET DOWN!!
What is it about our family and walks at night...?
(..and where is THE GARDEN DISTRICT...?)
New Orleans, Little Brother! Shame on you, haven't you ever stumbled down Bourbon Street at 3AM looking for a bar that would serve 4 obviously inebriated sailors?? Oh wait, that was me--[i]titter[/i]...never mind...
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