Uncertain Oneiromancy
dreamed 1993? by Denise Levertov
|
I spent the entire night leading a blind man
through an immense museum so that (by internal bridges, or tunnels? somehow!) he could avoid the streets, the most dangerous avenues, all the swift chaotic traffic . . . I persuaded him to allow my guidance, through to the other distant doors, though once inside, labyrinthine corridors, steps, jutting chests and chairs and stone arches bewildered him as I named them at each swerve, and were hard for me to manoeuver him around and between. As he could perceive nothing, I too saw only the obstacles, the objects with sharp corners; not one painting, not one carved credenza or limestone martyr. We did at last emerge, however, into that part of the city he had been headed for when I took over; he raised his hat in farewell, and went on, uphill, tapping his stick. I stood looking after him, watching as the street enfolded him, wondering if he would make it, and after I woke, wondering still what in me he was, and who the I was that took that long short-cut with him through room after room of beauty his blindness hid from me as if it had never been. |
EDITOR'S NOTE
"Uncertain Oneiromancy" is one of Levertov's late poems, published in Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996). I haven't yet pinned down when she dreamt it, but 1993 seems likely, give or take a year.
Her title suggests her own interpretation of the dream. Isn't this not-blind-but-as-if-blind groping how we usually stumble through dreams, and how we interpret them, waking? We may grasp immediacies, but our radius of awareness is terribly narrow. Might as well be blind.
I don't think Levertov's title is a stretch at all. It almost certainly is about dream interpretation.. Dreams are quite capable of commenting on themselves, on dreamwork, on how we get lost in the task at hand--even generosity--until we're blind to dreams' beauty--which may indeed be, as the dream hints, their real message.
I'll go further. To a literate dreamworker, and Levertov surely was, the dream even hints it's about dreaming itself. Groping through a labyrinthine underworld full of antique art... come on, isn't it all more Jungian than Jung's own dreams?
--Chris Wayan
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