I watched Richard Linklater's slow but steady rotoscope-aganza Waking Life the other evening. It nauseated me, but only for a half or so, and then it made me sleepy. So I paused it, shut my eyes for a few minutes, and returned to the Linklater Philosophicon refreshed and another hour or so of chit-chat, laid-back existential dread and paranioa, and an animated Wiley Wiggins. Waking Life, with its shifting backgrounds, five kinds of National Film Board style animation, and excessive talkiness is hard to watch but really good. I give it two Adornos, like so:

The premise of the movie, which is only revealed around 2/3 of the way through (unless you're a bright person and you figured it out in five minutes, like I didn't), is that the dreamer unable to wake up from his dream may be dead, and that the afterlife may simply be a permanent dream state. I can definitely see the appeal in that notion, but if it's true, then I already know the following things about my afterlife:

1. I will never, ever, ever get to have sex after I'm dead. Sure, I'll meet people, there'll be a mutual attraction and maybe even an embrace, but at the very last moment the girl (or guy, or stoat, or appliance) will say "Oh yeah, I have to pave over the cemeteries in Tadjikistan," or she'll suddenly be an asphalt pourer from Tadjikistan, or maybe we'll actually be having sex, but we'll be in the front seat of an asphalt roller and she'll be running over gravestones and swearing in Russian.

2. Everyone I never liked in my life will be at every party I go to.

3. My burgeoning theatre career will be an unending humiliation as I show up night after night and find each time that I haven't read the script¹.

4. No matter how hard I try, I will never be able to get out of the mall. Eventually I'll end up in the basement where the giant spider lives.

5. My vacations end up being endless drives along half-remembered highways and detours down logging roads. And if I actually remember to bring my luggage, at some point I'll simply leave it at the side of the road and curse my strange luck later on. Then I get attacked by that fucking bear.

6. Periodically I'll receive messages from a loving omnipresent power² reassuring me that the strange and horrific parts of my dreams (bear, spider, theatre career) are not what they appear to be, and that the horror is only a matter of perspective, or its temporary. I won't believe it for a second.

7. On the plus side, maybe I'll be able to smoke in my dreams. I went from being a seriously heavy smoker about three years ago to smoke-free, and while I don't miss it, I wouldn't mind taking it up again if I didn't have to fret about lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, premature wrinkling, joint stiffness, tooth decay, and all the smoking-related shocks the flesh is heir to.

8. Whenever I get some really cool thing, I won't ever wake up, think "I'm going to drive my new Ferrari to work" and then think "ah shit".

9. Despite the many pleasures of digestion, it'll be nice not to bother with the intake and outtake of food. Seriously, how often do you eat in your dreams? How often do you go to the bathroom?

10. I almost never dream of The Lotus. If I die and end up in dreamland, I want to hang out with The Lotus, and not wander the dimensions trying to track her down.

ANNE CARSON, YOU FREAKIN' ME OUT

The Lotus found the following passage on page 15 of Anne Carson's verse novel Autobiography of Red:

Testimonia on the Question of Stesichoros' Blinding by Helen

Suidas s.v. palinodia: "Counter song" or "saying the opposite of what you said before." E.g., for writing abuse of Helen Stesichoros was struck blind but then he wrote for her an encomium and got his sight back. The encomium came out of a dream and is called "The Palinode."

Isokrates Helen 64: Looking to demonstrate her own power Helen made an object lesson of the poet Stesichoros. For the fact is he began his poem "Helen" with a bit of blasphemy. Then when he stood up he found he'd been robbed of his eyes. Straightaway realizing why, he composed the so-called "Palinode" and Helen restored him to his own nature.

The Palinode of Stesichoros turns out to be remarkably simple:

No it is not the true story.
No you never went on the benched ships.
No you never came to the towers of Troy.

In case you're curious, Stesichoros was a poet born in 650 B.C. in the city of Himera on the north coast of Sicily. He was apparently popular in his day and wrote volumes of verse. I actually don't know much about Stesichoros beyond what information Anne Carson supplies, but there you go. I am, however, immensely gratified to find references to the remarkable healing qualities of the palinode.

¹My strangest theatre dream ever was a stage rendition of Joyce's Ulysses. We were putting on chapter 4 or 5, which takes place in a carriage on the way to a funeral. I was playing the part of Patty Dignam For some reason, though, the stage was crowded with people in turn of the century Irish clothing, so full that I couldn't get on the stage. Then it turned out that I couldn't find my shoes. When I woke up I realized that Patty Dignam was the dead guy, and that was probably the reason I was going barefoot.

²Yeah, that power actually shows up in my dreams occasionally, and it's always God. The first time I dreamed of God I was 13 or so. He was a drug dealer who held a puppy on a leash. The puppy's collar was rigged so that it held a hypodermic needle that would inject a lethal dose of something greenish into the puppy's neck if it pulled at the leash too hard. I asked Mr. Lord why he had the puppy rigged up like that, and He told me it was part of the puppy's training. I objected that pulling at the leash was in the puppy's nature, that the puppy would only get one chance, would pay for its first mistake with its life, and that it had no way of understanding the consequences of its mistake. God replied that the puppy had better not pull at the leash then. I can't believe that I still remember that dream after 18 years.

parode - exode