Saturday, May 7, 2005

I dream of Mingus

A dream with Charles Mingus in it: He and I are sitting in a dark room with floor-to-ceiling red drapes. There are bookshelves attached to metal posts on one wall. Mingus is methodically signing LPs (not mine) with a Sharpie and talking: "Remember--what I will be tomorrow, you have already been." The words in this dream seem backwards (me ahead of him?), but my guess is that they're related to the multiple selves in the opening paragraphs of Mingus' Beneath the Underdog (1971):

"In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's an over-loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid. But he can't--he goes back inside himself."      "Which one is real?"      "They're all real."

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