There was a dream I had in high school, one my memory has never been able to do justice. I was wandering through a crowded place—a fair or carnival, maybe. I don’t remember if I was intentionally looking for something, but I joined a large group of people all pressing in the same direction. We walked and walked, and after a while I found myself at a concert, standing in a great throng of people, watching a man play piano. His music was captivating, but the man himself was even more so. He was entirely glass—transparent and shining, dotted all over with multicolored jewels. His piano, too, was all jeweled glass. He played and played and I could not take my eyes off him. It is an image and a feeling that awake I cannot quite grasp, and yet I carry it with me. From time to time I try to bring him out of the depths to look at him clearly, but he is never as in-focus or as beautiful as he was in my dream.
* * *
There is another dream, one that comes back at different times in my life. The surrounding details often change, but the one constant is that I am trying to walk. I am trying to get somewhere, or escape from something, and I cannot move fast enough. Every step is like walking in deep water, slowed, ponderous, strained. And every step is incredibly painful. This is a dream that shadows me in waking hours at times, to the point that it feels like the memory of an actual event.
* * *
Have you ever had one of those conversations that twists out of your grasp? You try to say something, and somehow it changes direction in the space between you and the other person—its meaning floats away on the air like smoke. You feel like you are in a dream, then. You cannot trace back where you’ve been, and you do not know why the conversation has taken the turn it has, but the thing you wanted to say is lost. Somehow, though, you can still feel that thing in your heart. You hope it will stay with you, you wait for it to come back into focus.
* * *
The things you hold but cannot hold. The things you see but can't prove. The things you know but cannot name.
There is something to this—these things that change shape before our eyes, that slip out of our fingers before we can name them for what they are. And there is something about the fact that we see them better when we give them another form—whether in words, or in music, or in a piece of artwork.
* * *
My violin teacher in college taught me many things. Maybe the most important was that it wasn’t enough to just close my eyes and emote whatever. How was that communicating, he challenged me, if I didn’t know what I was trying to say?
Clarity is a hard thing, though. It seems to be something you have to come at sideways, sometimes. Or maybe it has to disintegrate and re-shape itself a few times before you really know what it is you’re dealing with. Sometimes there is nothing to be done but to wait for it to become visible.
* * *
One of the books my parents loved to read to me when I was a child was Attic of the Wind, by Doris Herold Lund. Or maybe it was that I loved hearing it read, I don't remember which, anymore. The attic of the wind was the place where all the things carried off by the wind—bubbles, snowflakes, autumn leaves, all the beautiful things that disappear—ended up. I loved the image of a place in the sky full of all those lovely lost things, and I loved the idea of visiting a place like that. There is something hopeful about the thought that the things which escape, the things that elude you, are gathered somewhere in a secret place.
Waiting for you to arrive.
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