In Dreams

Last night I read some of UTV before going to bed. That book is bound to play with my dreams. During the night I dreamt that Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was sitting in a cantina in Quauhnahuac with American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Ortiz, who’s Dominican, but I think in this dream represents a larger embodiment of the non-outsider, said something about how Cuernavaca (the name he used) was an excellent place to raise a family. Thoreau responded with a quote of his own as remembered by Emerson when he gave Thoreau’s eulogy, "What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey."

It was Roy Orbison who sang about a candy-colored clown they call the sandman who tiptoes to my room every night just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper, "Go to sleep. Everything is all right." It was Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet that really went ape shit crazy for that song. How all this ties back to UTV I'm not so sure.

Except that maybe Yvonne is like Ortiz, in that she strives for normalcy, where she too can be a non-outsider, to take the consul back to England, or to anywhere but Quauhnahuac (which she refuses to recognize for what it is). The Consul like Thoreau as he refuses to fall prey to any idea of normalcy (the family at dinner), especially since their divorce. The Consul is like Frank too, because he is self-indulgent but in a profoundly solipsistic, Cartesian way; but maybe the Consul's the candy-colored clown who freely encourages the consumption of barbituates.