one thousand worlds 868 & 857

Stalking Incident

“Failte a ghrá” (Welcome, my love), I was going to say.


(The children grew with every scene of this dream and one after another, became a different younger cousin of mine.)

My aunt, mother and I were in the public bathroom with a young child who needed to use the toilet. My aunt put her on the seat and she slipped down under the water. She was squashed into the bowl and completely submerged, looking up at us. The image was similar to a formaldehyde specimen baby. The other women in the space backed out of the room. I was eager to get her out before she died so I grabbed her.

However, she (now A.) still needed to use the toilet.

Now there were other children around. A.’s legs were longer and she could talk. I got a mesh toilet seat, not quite right but better than her drowning. Her (now C.) legs were in the toilet but the mesh would catch the waste.

She finished so I lifted her off and she was a boy (now D.). The mesh hadn’t worked; it had become a metal tray. There was a mess everywhere and the smell was incredibly bad. I could not stand it. [I didn’t know you could smell things in dreams.] I was struggling to get away from it but I was also really trying to clean up the child and all the surroundings. I was encouraging him (now L.) to clean up but he had grown into a young teenager and was only interested in going off with his friends. He walked away fully dressed, scratching his backside.

We—Dave, my brother; Caitriona, my cousin; Shane, her brother; and the grown children of my aunt—were in a restaurant. Shane had paid for the meal. I was late, having come from getting the children ready. I ordered salmon. Shane ordered dessert behind the partition. The restaurant seemed to be closed. He didn’t say that he had paid. My brother also went and ordered dessert so now there were two.

I got into a car that was slightly out of control. It was my car and I was in a city like New York (it wasn’t busy so maybe it was Brussels), but I wasn’t too far from home. I pulled into park and the car kept going towards a Chinese copy shop. I swerved around and pulled into park in a bus stop—thinking that it was not right to do so! Finally, I got the car to stop going at the Chinese copy shop, which was now an Asian restaurant.

I was meeting artist friends at the Asian restaurant. It was very busy—not full of people—full of dirty dishes. While the owner was ringing up checks at the register and handing out plates, we discussed the formal way I was going to address the dignitaries to whom I was about to make a speech. It was supposed to happen very soon and it was all news to me. “Failte a ghrá” (Welcome, my love), I was going to say. Apparently, according to the owner, this wasn’t appropriate. She was making suggestions but they didn’t sound right. I was going to have to call a language expert.

I took the call downstairs. Everyone talked to him first and then passed the phone over to me. The language expert was Rob Katy, (Will O’Kanes /Jeff Schneiders dealer in New York).  When I finally got on the phone, he asked, “What can I do for the woman you’re showing with? The one with the orange paintings?”

Then I was alone. They had all got off the line and the phone cut off. I went back upstairs to ask Will/Jeff why I had been talking to the dealer and what was happening? Will/Jeff said, “Oh, well he wrote a film last year, ‘Kowloon into the Wonderland.’[1] You can see it online.” So I went off to do that.

On the way I met a teacher, who asked about the little girls.

She said she was sorry about my cousin (he had died). Then she said, “I feel responsible for the stalking incident.”

 

[1] When I awoke, I googled this title to see if it exists. It does not.


Dream of the Drawing for Everything alchemies dream-like things: images and texts and films and sketches and philosophy and half-thoughts and visions and moments and fragments of all kinds. Resting and exploring here may deepen your relationship with the oneiric and, therefore, all apparent reality. Resting and exploring here may augment your psyche’s healing tendency—as Jung called it—through highlighting and delighting in humanity’s hallucinatory creations. (Without them, after all, neurologists assure us we would go starkers.) It is time there was a potentially infinite, intimate museum to what cannot be seen. Welcome to the museum.

Dream of the Drawing for Everything is some of the collaboration between artist Nuala Clarke & writer Crystal Gandrud. Our work arises out of what dances on the edges of perception and our collective attention gravitates to the dream-like nature of human experience. We have been in collaboration since 2010. Our merged practices of visual and textual art unfold on a continuum, as part of an interconnected series evolving over time. Both performed “Fair Shouldered One” (a book which is not a book) at the &Now Literary Festival in Paris, 2012 and installed “Between Spaces”, a Yeats inspired dreamscape at the Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, 2013. Most recently participated in the Find Arts Project in Castlebar, Ireland. Our public art installation of words and images printed on linen, “Woven Found”, hung on Castle Street. The project won the best commissioning practice award from Allianz Business to Arts, 2014.

Nuala Clarke

Nuala Clarke, visual artist, lives and works between Co. Mayo and New York City. Educated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, she moved to New York City in 1993. In September 2007, she received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo and began returning to Ireland from NY to work every year. Clarke has been represented by Boltax Gallery, NY since 2005. Recent shows include, Amid a Space Between: Irish Artists in America at the SFMoMa Artists Gallery, San Francisco, (2012); to Tremble into Stillness, a WB Yeats related show at Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; RHA invited artist; and A drawing for Everything, Ballinglen Arts Foundation (2013). BLINK, a public art installation at the Westport Arts Festival, Co. Mayo (2014). Upcoming shows (2015): Impressions of Yeats, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo; Of this place, Sligo and Madrid.

nualaclarke@gmail.com

Crystal Gandrud

Crystal Gandrud, writer, lives in New York City and Normandy, France. She holds an MFA, Creative Writing and a BFA, Classical Theatre. Recent publications include “Yeatsian: Numberless Dreamers,” The Encyclopedia Project, 2014, “Here,” Lost Magazine, and “Idiom: Woodbird Flies Early,” The Encyclopedia Project. Her dissertation, “Murdoch: the Mandala Maker,” was presented at Kingston University’s Iris Murdoch Conference (2006), London. At the most recent Murdoch Conference, she performed a multi-media excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled “The Forgotten Man,” inspired by Murdoch’s philosophical writings. She is under contract for a memoire entitled “Astonishment: A Litany of the Uncanny.”

gandrud@actuallyorange.com

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