NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
The broken couch is alive with stains. Long dried, but visible under a light coating of dust, and visually energetic in Artie’s studio above the Cavendish Pie Shop. The back of the couch has separated from the arms. It is sprinkled with thick white plaster dust and supported by the wall behind. Steve removes a paint clotted towel from the nearest cushion to find a protected spot. He looks at faint remains of the monogram in a flourishing script. “Hotel Ducasse.”
“When did you swipe this thing, Artie?”
Artie shrugs, wiping plaster dust off the seat of an old chair for bel to sit on. A narrow box across the back holds scrapers and a hammer with handles sticking up over the end.
Steve sits on the edge of the cushion, leaning forward to avoid getting powdered.
“Where is Bounder?’
“He and Cangiante are down stairs.”
“This looks like an old church chair.”
“It is bel. Got it at a yard sale.”
“You are supposed to have your hymnal and Bible in back there.”
“Those are tools for worship, mine are tools for dreaming.”
“Do you think dreams mean anything Artie, or are they just random eventsin the brain?”
“I don’t think they are meaningless, Fred.”
“You know, people denied their dreams in experiments, start hallucinating.”
“Yes, it is thought to be an integrative process.”
“That’s right Fred, but no one knows much about it.”
“Well, they are so amorphous and stuff appears and disappears…who knows what’s going on.”
“Steve, I must be hallucinating now! A cat’s head just appeared up in that hole in the wall.”
Artie’s railwayman’s cap and navy-blue tea shirt are also powdered white and her hair around the base of the cap looks dowsed with confectioner’s sugar. She tips her cap and powder smokes down her back as she looks up.
“Don’t you remember Fred, that’s Sfumato? Oooops! Now she’s gone back to the Pie Shop.”
“How could I forget?”
“She won’t come down until I am through Fred…The other two will lick the dust if I keep them here.”
“So, what are you up to?”
“I was standing on the back of the couch Steve, so as to sand up there on that wall.”
“How about a step ladder?”
“They borrowed it downstairs…seemed quicker to step up there on the back.”
“Well yes, but now you have a busted couch.”
“You’re sitting on it, aren’t you Steve?”
“Yes, very carefully, and you notice Fred is sitting on that thing over there.”
“That thing was molded, a nice smooth accurate model of the space inside an empty bucket!”
“A solid piece of space!”
“A volume Steve, rendered in plaster…coated with resin.”
“You might have used a transparent medium.”
“That’s interesting, Steve.”
“I am thinking of being able to see dust particles floating in it.”
“It might work too, but that wouldn’t look so solid, and also, I was using the plaster to fix the wall back there.”
She gestures further back into the studio, where we have never been. As if pushing air down the passage with the flat of her hand.
“You mean you made too much?”
“I was interrupted Steve, when I saw Cangiante licking the dust off her fur. So, I asked Mrs. Rutherford if she could hang out with Bounder in back of the Cavendish.”
“With all that food? Is that sanitary?
“No bel, you know, out in the shed where they park the van.”
“We didn’t see him when we came in.”
Artie fingers the ribbed paper dust mask hanging around her neck from its thin elastic thread.
“Someone probably had him out on a walk.”
“What are you working on now?”
“Ah…” She kicks some used sandpaper from under foot.
“Well…that wall.”
She regards the wall quietly for a moment and then,
“…until you all dropped in.”
Bel gets up from her chair, groping for the handles of her bag on the floor without looking away from Artie.
“Yes, well, do you want to get back to work?”
“No, that’s okay bel.”
Bel sits down again, now looking for the handles she didn’t find. Her ring tones sound like a Barred owl in the room. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtRPYpklhiA)
“Are you preparing for a mural?”
“No Fred.”
“Well, I mean, what are you doing that wall for?
Sfumato’s tortoiseshell head has appeared again, Cheshire-like, rubbing her whiskers against the outer edge of the dark rectangular opening left by the old vent.
“The walls need patching and painting and I need something to do.”
Steve gets up and stands by Artie and they look at the high wall behind the couch together.
“What is it, about fifteen feet?”
“Yeah it is half an inch lower above the door than it is at the corner.”
“Looks like stuff has been torn out up there.”
“Don’t know what that was, but I took off a layer of yellow paint and another of gray before hitting the plaster…this is all old-fashioned plaster and lath. See that bulge over there?”
We can see a bulge where her work bench meets the other wall, and doesn’t fit snug against it.
“Looks like the wall is giving out.”
Bel looks up from her phone.
“Artie, we haven’t seen you since the Caillebotte exhibition.”
“That long? When was that?”
“Back in 2015 Fred.”
Steve looks at Artie with his head to one side. She pushes the ‘Shopvac’ with her foot, and it rolls over by the door.
“I’ve been up here a few times since then, during the mouse war.”
“Yeah, those two cats were raising hell in here all night.”
“I remember when we were looking at the catalogue downstairs in front of the shop.”
“Right Fred, I have been doing some dream work since then. Since I got so pissed off.”
“Pissed off about what Artie?”
“Let’s not go there. Any way I was teaching a course at PU last year.”
“So, Frank Vasari found you too!”
“Like I said, I am not going there…You know dream work? I mean you ever do any Steve?”
“Bel has, I haven’t.”
“I was reading Carl Jung at the time, and started writing them down.”
“Did you find out anything?”
“Well Artie, I wrote down about sixty of them over three months, never did get to an interpretation.”
“Writing them down is an interpretation!”
“I guess it is Artie.”
“Sure, think about it.”
“Yeah, think of all the nonverbal stuff…I mean dreaming is a kind of experience, like art.”
Steve is pulling on his beard.
“When you can remember it.”
“Well, right! … I have written some, and drawn some and even did some work in plaster.”
“Plaster?”
“I used plaster dust Fred.”
“What?”
“Think of this; Goya spreads pigment and oil on a piece of woven flax and makes you think you are looking at the duke of Wellington. It is not the duke. Yet the image of his face is there…that illusion, that transformation is kind of dreamlike, don’t you think?”
“Well, I guess. Maybe that’s why it was stolen. I am not sure I get it though.”
“Not just that painting…”
“Yeah, art messes with identity”
“…and appearance, Steve.”
“Sure, it does bel. If you look at it one moment, and think paint and see only paint and then the next instant you see, and think of Wellington and Waterloo…”
“Right Artie, or look at Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington, any portrait, or any rendering.”
Steve keeps walking around, looking at the floor Artie had cleaned up. Now he is standing by bel.
“Aren’t we really talking about perception?”
Artie and bel both speak at once, then we all fall silent. Bounder is barking down stairs, and a plane goes over with its engine note rising. Artie opens the door and looks down into the shed for Bounder.
“Can we see some of your plaster work?”
She steps back across the threshold.
“This whole room got a dustcover. It was kind of dreamlike, kind of dry granular fog too.”
“Do you have any of your granular fog work up here Artie?”
“Sure, it will turn your thoughts into cobwebs!”
Artie walks back down the hall to the right of her bench and the window. Bel stands up and starts to comment on some small white objects on the bench, but stops as Artie comes back.
Artie has something covered in gray and white on a board. Plaster particles rise into a sun beam like a cloud of gnats, as she puts it down in front of the window.
“What’s under there Artie?”
“Fred, that’s the question of interpreting this coincidence.”
We are crowding around the bench, pressing closer and closer together.
“Well, I think there is a framed photograph and some kind of box. See there, they aren’t quite covered by the cloth or dust.”
Bel goes on, identifying an old transistor radio and points out traces of yellow in gray.
“There’s a book I think.”
Steve bends down, looks closer, and gently lifts a corner of the cloth just an inch.
“I can read the title from here Fred, it’s John Ashbery’s, Hotel Lautréamont.”
A lump of dust falls from the cloth and disintegrates into a tiny cloud. More falls through the cheese cloth’s open weave as he lets go.
“Well, no one can read it now!”
He straightens up awkwardly and staggers as he turns to Artie, but regains his balance.
“Okay Artie, I think these things were on your bench when you started on the walls, right?”
“You’ve got it Steve!”
“That’s yellow and gray you mentioned before!”
“Right bel, and I draped the cheese cloth over stuff for protection.”
Artie is standing back with her arms folded watching us look at her granulated dream work, settled on the bench.
“So, this was all an accident, right?”
“Right bel, I looked back at the bench after standing up on it, to reach above the window, and found all that.”
“Yeah, look! You left a foot print!”
“Only one though, Fred.”
“Have you looked up what dreams mean…like water means this or flying means that?”
“Yeah, tried it, but none of the theories hold up.”
“Only the dreamer can tell what her dream means.”
“and only sometimes bel.”
“I was sanding the walls. I was pissed off and distracted…I mean that’s what got me into to dream work in the first place. You know, I didn’t have anything else to do.”
“That’s what we were talking about before Artie.”
“Right, I was up against it at that point.”
I step aside to look at another part of the bench. Find a soup bowl discernable with a wrench and screwdriver, and Zippo lighter, under their blanket of plaster, and awakening to recognition. A small empty can next to it, maybe the soup can, has been reduced to a white cylinder. What might be a watch, with broken strap, and other small objects lie incognito, next to the bowl, under yellow and gray powder.
Artie picks up a small hand-held electric fan and a piece of cardboard, and blows dust gently into small clouds. Enough comes up to make us all cough, without dust masks. Steve walks away from the bench.
“White nightmare!”
“Sorry about that everyone.”
Artie switches off the fan. The objects have dissolved into a solid mass under the settling particles, as if it had snowed all night. Then with a few skillful swipes of the cardboard, the side of a watch, and the ends of the wrench and screwdriver come clean and easy to identify.
“Are you dreaming yet Fred?”
“Yeah, the timepiece and tool handles must mean something!”
“It is all physics Fred, air, motion, direction, turbulence, etc.”
Bel is shaking her head at Steve.”
“I think that’s too reductive.”
“Isn’t that what is going on here?”
“That’s only the mechanism…”
“I see Artie, like the lump in the bucket.”
“Dr. Hollis says the content of a dream is like a call to central casting from the unconscious.”
“What is that supposed to mean bel?”
“Fred, if you say you dreamed of a rabbit, you have identified the actor, not the part he is playing.”
“Who is Hollis anyway?”
“He is a Jungian analyst. I went to a series of his talks on dream interpretation.”
Steve is standing behind bel, looking over her shoulder at the objects Artie brought in, arranged on a board like a still life in hiding. First, he lifts his glasses above his eyes, then looks again with them on.
“Trying to identify those objects, is like trying to recall something.”
“Trying to recall a dream Steve.”
“Okay Artie, that’s the experience!”
