I've been having vivid dreams at night, and working on short stories during the day. This prompt helped me realize, rather recently, that the way I write feels, in my body, like sight reading music. I feel like I'm racing against the clock, trying to scoop up as much approximate accuracy as I can get, before I lose. It's like, I know I'll definitely fuck up the actual music, but at least if I can sort of keep up, even if I forgo accurate pitch and only aim for rhythm, I can at least get a shape, or the gist of a thing, down. That's how I feel when I try to journal about my dreams that I'm on the verge of forgetting, and that's how I feel when I try to write a story. I've just recently figured this out. By approximation, I mean: I'll say something happened in a pool, knowing it wasn't a pool in the dream, but if that's the best word I can come up with on the fly without dwelling too long on accuracy and losing the rest of the dream, then I'll put it down and move on. My hope in doing this is that the whole will contain more than the sum of its inaccurate parts. Sometimes it does.
Here's my response to this prompt. I didn't do toes, but I did notice my body feels like it's sight reading a piece of music. I also did get some stuff down that felt true, even though it's all wrong, and you're not even supposed to write about dreams according to some people, but wth.
"Dreamt"
I was diving into a pool for fallen petals: massive, translucent things veined through with what looked like the blood vessels that, earlier in the week, my optometrist had taken pictures of and shown me, saying, look here, healthy eyes, good. Petals veined and pink, like the flowers falling from the tree under which Mulan and her father sat, after she failed her bridal exams. I’m diving for the sunken petals because there’s a tyrant coming who will be angry with someone if the pool floor is dirty, and I’ve decided to cover for them. The tyrant will rage if he catches me, but I’ll risk it. When I emerge, wet, I have the petals in my fist, and just as I’m about to climb out of the pool, the tyrant bursts through the gate, reeling and drunk. He doesn’t notice my fist of petals at first, and I quickly hide my hands in the gutter’s open mouth. We discuss the weather. Nice evening for a swim, he says. When he glances up at the sky, I throw my fist of crumpled petals out of the pool, and climb out. Shiver as a wind begins to blow, knocking fresh petals off the tree overhanging the pool. The sun has set, and the pool lights flicker on. Pink jelly boats float across the glowing. The tyrant leaves. By the time he returns, his pool floor will be littered once more with the newly fallen, and he will have no one to blame. Each breath of wind releases petals: sheaves of wide, soft cups. The tyrant will come back none the wiser. He will be struck by the floating petals, the image of a curved back resting on a liquid sheet, the soft hiss of lines meeting after a long fall. He will be struck, as I am, with the impossibility of proving what he suspects, that while his back was turned, small mercies were given out by small things, not particularly brave or good, diving and trying to cover for someone other than themselves.
I love your description of writing as similar to sight-reading music - it's so apt, that sense of improvising a world. and I love the dream-world of this piece, the pink petals and the pool, the idea of "small mercies... given out by small things"
Thanks Katie! I'm really glad the music analogy makes sense to someone besides myself lol. Something else - in a poetry talk about lyric vs narrative, one of the poets mentioned that a difference between lyric and narrative poems is that narrative functions along a linear track of time, whereas lyrical poetry's insistence on music is its own form of time - music being the dimension of the poem that measures time. Thinking about music and poetry is pretty interesting - like, how far could you go with it? Could the musical resolution / chord progressions, so to speak, in the poem, suffice to stand in for a resolution of the actual content of the poem?
I've been having vivid dreams at night, and working on short stories during the day. This prompt helped me realize, rather recently, that the way I write feels, in my body, like sight reading music. I feel like I'm racing against the clock, trying to scoop up as much approximate accuracy as I can get, before I lose. It's like, I know I'll definitely fuck up the actual music, but at least if I can sort of keep up, even if I forgo accurate pitch and only aim for rhythm, I can at least get a shape, or the gist of a thing, down. That's how I feel when I try to journal about my dreams that I'm on the verge of forgetting, and that's how I feel when I try to write a story. I've just recently figured this out. By approximation, I mean: I'll say something happened in a pool, knowing it wasn't a pool in the dream, but if that's the best word I can come up with on the fly without dwelling too long on accuracy and losing the rest of the dream, then I'll put it down and move on. My hope in doing this is that the whole will contain more than the sum of its inaccurate parts. Sometimes it does.
Here's my response to this prompt. I didn't do toes, but I did notice my body feels like it's sight reading a piece of music. I also did get some stuff down that felt true, even though it's all wrong, and you're not even supposed to write about dreams according to some people, but wth.
"Dreamt"
I was diving into a pool for fallen petals: massive, translucent things veined through with what looked like the blood vessels that, earlier in the week, my optometrist had taken pictures of and shown me, saying, look here, healthy eyes, good. Petals veined and pink, like the flowers falling from the tree under which Mulan and her father sat, after she failed her bridal exams. I’m diving for the sunken petals because there’s a tyrant coming who will be angry with someone if the pool floor is dirty, and I’ve decided to cover for them. The tyrant will rage if he catches me, but I’ll risk it. When I emerge, wet, I have the petals in my fist, and just as I’m about to climb out of the pool, the tyrant bursts through the gate, reeling and drunk. He doesn’t notice my fist of petals at first, and I quickly hide my hands in the gutter’s open mouth. We discuss the weather. Nice evening for a swim, he says. When he glances up at the sky, I throw my fist of crumpled petals out of the pool, and climb out. Shiver as a wind begins to blow, knocking fresh petals off the tree overhanging the pool. The sun has set, and the pool lights flicker on. Pink jelly boats float across the glowing. The tyrant leaves. By the time he returns, his pool floor will be littered once more with the newly fallen, and he will have no one to blame. Each breath of wind releases petals: sheaves of wide, soft cups. The tyrant will come back none the wiser. He will be struck by the floating petals, the image of a curved back resting on a liquid sheet, the soft hiss of lines meeting after a long fall. He will be struck, as I am, with the impossibility of proving what he suspects, that while his back was turned, small mercies were given out by small things, not particularly brave or good, diving and trying to cover for someone other than themselves.
I love your description of writing as similar to sight-reading music - it's so apt, that sense of improvising a world. and I love the dream-world of this piece, the pink petals and the pool, the idea of "small mercies... given out by small things"
Thanks Katie! I'm really glad the music analogy makes sense to someone besides myself lol. Something else - in a poetry talk about lyric vs narrative, one of the poets mentioned that a difference between lyric and narrative poems is that narrative functions along a linear track of time, whereas lyrical poetry's insistence on music is its own form of time - music being the dimension of the poem that measures time. Thinking about music and poetry is pretty interesting - like, how far could you go with it? Could the musical resolution / chord progressions, so to speak, in the poem, suffice to stand in for a resolution of the actual content of the poem?