The Desk Dream

Genre: Lyric Essay

I, like you and any other attentive person, hear a good deal of interesting things day to day. Some are more interesting than others (last January during a horrible storm my building's super told me that more than 10% of the world's salt is used to de-ice American streets and sidewalks). And some are not interesting at all (the dull-voiced boy at the market loves to remind me that 'Eggplants aren't vegetables, they're really fruits,' which, I'll add, I'm not sure is true). Like most attentive people, I have forgotten a great many of the interesting things I've heard. Often times, the less interesting things pass through my mind as I lay in bed at night trying earnestly to recall the interesting things. That is how it happened I came to fight Virginia Wolfe (oh yes, I know - how boring).

Did you know, Virginia Wolfe once mused on her life? I'm sure you did. What I mean to say is there was a time before the river. Before her mind had come to questions like, how heavy a stone to sink a woman my size? (large, but small enough to fit in the pocket of her coat). Yes, she wrote of her life without considering her sort of mortal end. She wrote of how she imagined her life in furniture form (with corners and shelves).

She imagined her life being a great big desk, or so she wrote.

This is not an entirely interesting thing. A desk, holding papers, dripping candle wax and bleeding ink from it's oaken pores, like her (oh that drama queen, the Sinking Princess). And it was this less than interesting thing - a relatively dull musing (The Desk's) and my musing upon it that brought her to my dream.

Many have told me not to bore others (and I suppose myself) with writings about dreams and meanings. I rarely take notice of what other advise and will do just half of this. I will tell you of the dream and spare you the meaning (anyhow, you'd be at a loss, I'm sure). Nonetheless,

Because I am too late (too young and have seen The Hours) Virginia (The Desk) looked much more like an actress playing herself (Virginia 4.0, not Nicole Kidman - no prosthetics, but a cheaper, softer version - yes).

As I lay in bed thinking of her, I asked myself... would you (me, the dreamer) be a desk? and falling asleep I answered,

*

Why, yes. What a desk I'd be. I'd be wanting. If I were a desk I’d be wanting to be a bed. And I agreed. That is, before she came hammering. Yes, Virgina came to my door. I opened it and thought: Virgina's fist are peculiar little acorns, and turned to see her rattling the windowsills of my apartment.

'All in the name of! All in the early hour of!' I screamed (which, in a dream, sounds like a scream but underwater) .

'All in the name of misinterpretation,' she said. She continued, 'you've misinterpreted me.' And I told her, 'I am bored with you, Pestering Woman.’

'What did you say?' - Her question.

And my unexpected answer was to let her in, and sit her on my couch. I reminded her that she knew boredom well. I reminded her that she understood bitterness, like mine. I told her I was bitter with her for stealing all my short paragraphs, for taking out narrative and filling it in with tea parties and ‘I’ll get the flowers myself.’

(It’s an awful thing to quote an author in your coy assault on them) And when she bit her lip and turned to the side, I saw her then an awkward girl. Not -The Desk- but more The Cafeteria table. She slumped beside me, and I pressed my thumb on the nape of her neck. And then (with something like a sniffle, but in poetics and with rhyme) she said:

‘If you, The Dreamer, were a book it’d be Kundera’s' (somehow she knew I hated that book). I stopped and thought of Prague (it's not really pink, you know). I grew angry. How dull. Unbearable Lightness, a sham. I yelled.

'Life and death, I?'

'Heaviness and Lightness, I?'

'From first to last?' and I put my index finger over her mouth.

‘You're nothing but a shallow conflict. ’ she went on ‘The reader, left to try,to decide which life is happier: light or the dark? grace or weight?’

'What is so unbearable about lightness, Fickle Heart?' she asked.

Only she doesn't (didn't, or never did) know the charm, that Virgina, that smoked-fruit. She was never light. She could only write with lightness. And even then she wrote of flowers so as to describe the grey hallways in which they sat.

*

And then, that falling feeling. From the bed to awake as loud as the alarm clock stops. And I was awake – awake and with the the realization that, with no hope of knowing the right, the shady pathways from the wrong, there is no wrong path.

Absolved of mistakes. The necessity of significance. And she wasn't there in my bed (because then was a dream and now was awake). I thought of Virgina and her sense of weight, a stone in her coat. Because what happens once never happened. And I fell back asleep with no stone in my pocket. It did not happen once for her, but over and over until her final waltz into the currents that be. And now here I am, telling you (in some detail) about this less than interesting thing, a dream about Virgina Wolfe. But I will not tell you the meaning. That would be boring. Which is, of course, to assume you are like those who advise not to write of dreams - those stubborn minds who have yet to realize that the dream is the meaning as soon as one tells it to a third party. That is to say all this really means is I'm the sort of person who dreams about The Desk.