Mosaic I

1972 DreamsThis is what I dreamt last night: three or four men showed up in my apartment, a place I have never lived in, but apparently had just moved into. They look like men from detective novels or films (which I have lately begun devouring, for the first time in my life) and although I can’t describe their nondescript faces, I know they are businesslike, they have agreed on something in advance, they are experts in some field I know nothing about. Like men who, for example, energetically represent some company, most likely a boutique, or something to do with advertising or lighting. They are perfectly irreproachable, but all the same also intimidating, precisely because they exude a sort of stoical expertise – akin to conspirators – strong chins, imperturbable, know-it-alls. Elegant, but unassumingly so, in an inconspicuous way, not fashionable.I am their client.They have cardboard boxes which also have a very serious air, awe-inspiring and professional; there is something written on them. The cardboard (the boxes, that is) are a nice color, and hard, of good quality. The boxes contain something like mosaic tiles. Their colors are not mixed. I remember a jarring shade of blue, something like a manganese cerulean, and a very saturated orange, but beautiful in terms of pictorial value. Or like an orange, shining in an empty space, whether in the unfurnished apartment or space in general I don’t know.For my apartment is not furnished at all, there isn’t a single piece of furniture in it – the walls are white and everything is bare. The only surface which apparently offers itself to the experts with the mosaic stones is a cracked-open ivory-colored door. Somebody has walked through that door recently, perhaps my late mother, or someone else, meaning that I do not live alone in the apartment. The leader of the gang of experts reaches into a box and pulls out a handful of something, I do not yet know what it will be. He throws it at the half-open door. The sound is dry, as if he were throwing rice or lentils – and the blue mosaic tiles fall into shapes on the door. They stick to the door like magnets, irregular in shape, quadrangular, gleaming faintly in the emergency light of some forlorn bare bulb. The experts peer at the door and the stones with interest, I am also looking at them, when it all changes in a flash. Where before the stones were densely together, now they are further apart, but I understand this is an association with paintings by Kandinsky or someone like that, and now the composition continues to change. Again and again, over and over. I gaze at it in awestruck respect, for this is supposed to be some kind of a psychological examination of my persona, which is very gravely ill. Again I discover within myself, as I do in a waking state, the sources of a sanctified fear of knowledge, which I can never master, of which I can never master even a shadow of understanding, and which in that dream I make up for with an obsequious gasp. Like when you pretend to be amazed in order to flatter someone.Then the tiles somehow disappear, and the expert who threw them throws some more – of different hues – at the door, repeating his action as though conducting a test. At one point different color values even appear: yes, I recall something like Bach’s well-tempered clavier, translated into a violet-blue greyish color, the color I love so much in Joan Miró’s paintings. The color appears in all its shades down to the strange rose tint which so few can tackle with impunity, all the way to the darker tones, with echoes of dark-blue, but more of a dark brown – like a cup of cocoa in twilight. And finally, after the wide range of varieties offered to me by these specialists in order to treat the ailment I seem to be suffering from, a handful of orange tiles is thrown at the door, and these again reassemble and reconfigure themselves. I feel a growing sense that it is I who am doing the reconfiguring, that these tiles are in fact some kind of a thermometer, or a cardiograph, that these patterns are some kind of testimony about me, evidence of something that these experts are studying with great attention. They frighten me. I stand there in house clothes, as I had no idea they were going to show up, and am therefore wearing a dress which is torn at the seams, a dress I actually love wearing in reality because it’s a soft, comforting rag, yellow with a snakeskin pattern – and so there I stand, rather awkwardly, uncomfortable in the sense that I should have dressed for the occasion. And all of this is beginning to get to me.I can see that these fellows – and they are not simply specialists in treatment, but also have some higher political function, which I can sense – are drawing some sort of conclusions about me based on these colors and configurations, and are doing so apparently with great ease and facility. Very matter-of-factly, with no concern for my pain, my nervous disorder, which is actually real even outside of the dream, and caused by the likelihood that I will no longer be able to work in film. And so I am dismayed and also somehow ashamed that I submit myself to this kind of examination, without offering resistance, when suddenly the boss among the experts points at one of the orange configurations and asks me coldly, although pleasantly, like a psychologist or a psychiatrist: –So, what is this? And I reply, defensive, all too quickly and stupidly –It’s a kind of bouquet growing out of a city which lies completely abandoned. –And even as I utter these words, I feel that I should quickly retract such downright bullshit, even if only for the reason that it’s full of artsy-fartsy mimicry of some poets, and that I’m blathering like someone in the movies trying to show off. And indeed, I can see the chief expert saying patronizingly: –Oh, indeed, it does rather look like that. – And he eyes me skeptically, and I know that he has already made his diagnosis. And then he asks, when did I see a flower and tiles like this AT OTHER TIMES (WHEN???), and what do I do? I say: –I always feel like getting drunk. – To which he replies drily: –Yes, there’s a lot of boozing going on these days. –And that’s the end of the dream. It’s an anti-alcoholic dream that has taken on a form in both science and color. And in that utterance – there’s a lot of boozing going on – I felt a fear that this is about me, and a fear of scientists who are examining me and see all this as clearly as if written in chalk on a blackboard, and I woke up depressed. Outside, the night was abominable, a night when the moon shines through thin clouds, and the autumnal wind blows up and down the terrace like a crazed minion of death.