I lately have dreams in which I seem to rattle off facts, arcane facts of the specialist, facts that only the kenner* would know, facts spoken by me with alarmingly erudite authority, fluid cognition and intellectual confidence.
The portion of my brain which monitors these dreams, that part which tries and fails to remember dreams, is surprised and impressed, and thinks I should write this stuff down, as I will forget it on the morrow. I attend these dreams as if going to a lecture, and I am routinely amazed at the knowledge lingering in my brain, unspewn anywhere except for these nocturnal lectures.
*Why is “kenner” not a word? Since grade school I thought a “kenner” was a very smart and educated person, someone whose ken reached far, for whom nothing was beyond their ken. Somebody make kenner a word!
This dream state is like Regan in “The Exorcist”, where the possessed girl summons languages and knowledge unknown to her, though perhaps gathered up by osmosis. The facts in my dreams and the bodies of knowledge which comprise them are known to me — I know they exist — but I have never studied or learned them, nor would I ever presume to speak on these matter with authority.
Thus it surprises me to see and hear them presented to me from within my own mind. Where did this erudition come from?
The truth, of course, is that no such facts exist, not in this head, not in this mind, not in this inert spectacle of self-satisfied oblivion. If I wake thinking I should write any of it down then I do not, because there is nothing there. The dream of my scholarly elocutions leave but hollow echoes to my conscious mind. The supposed statements of learned fact and studied research are but mumbles of gibberish, murmurings of gobbledygook, and postured doublespeak of the sort that makes the silent man seem the smartest among those who talk too clearly and too much.
It makes sense that I would dream this way. I lately contemplate my failures in life, my absences and lack of accomplishment.
I remembered a game I used to play with myself and others, though the others were sometimes unwitting participants. In the middle of sane sentences or conversations I would insert garbage. If someone asked me “How was your afternoon?” I might say “It was ok, I went to the grocery store, went to the post office, I grogglepopped bunnyhonks, and I got a burger at the diner.” Rarely did anyone question the bit about the grogglepopped bunnyhonks but when they did I would say something else, something sane and mundane, replacing the grogglepop with lollipop and bunnyhonks with funny, thus clarifying that I bought a funny lollypop. This specific invention of grogglepopped bunnyhonks is new to the moment, new to now, newly concocted as an example for the purpose of sharing the secret game I used to play, but the substance of the idea is the same: inject mental effluvium and babble into the everyday and see if anyone notices. I remember unintentional instances of this phenomenon, occasioned by my own mis-speaking and those of others, with innocuous but nevertheless tantalizing results. In college a friend and I studied together for the final exam in a class we both took, a class in music history, and from his notes he rattled off a list of composers who wrote operas: “Verdi, Rossini, Bizet, Bazooni, Puccini…” I asked “Who’s Bazooni?” My study partner was adamant in his knowledge of this composer, whose name was new to me, but whose operas he claimed to have listened to at the library. We eventually concluded that he meant Bellini, not Bazooni, though I later imagined he may also have meant Busoni, though that seemed less likely. He claimed he had mentioned Bazooni in a paper he wrote earlier that semester, and it passed without comment from the professor. From this rose my belief that professors rarely read every word of lengthy papers, and I injected obscenities and incongruities into certain of my term papers. Only once was it noticed.
Conspiracies could rise up from this stuff, as could ridicule and dismay.
I have been on an OCD-esque binge, editing and proofreading an old encyclopedia of American biography, amusing myself not with the content (which occasionally sparkles with interesting things) but with the linguistic challenges of text-munging and fixing OCR errors in fell swoops. There probably are linguistic libraries of word-endings and -beginnings which, leveraged by regex and the like, could gobble up the errors in this 1000-page volume. I amuse myself, though, with discovering the heuristics. The scanned document (which I snarfed from a public domain repository) contains pretty well-recognized text but for some reason it misses a lot of hyphenated linebreaks. So line-broken words like Pennsyl-vania often come up as Pennsyl vania, with a line break in between. A typical entry in this old book looks like this:
ADAIR, JOHN, soldier, legislator, United States senator, was born in 1759, in Chester county, S. C. He emigrated to Kentucky in 1787; served as a major in the border warfare of the time; was elect ed to the Kentucky legislature, serving one year as speaker; in 1799 was a mem ber of the convention which formed the state constitution; subsequently held the office of register of the land office in Ken tucky; and was a senator of the United States from Kentucky during the years 1805 and 1806. He commanded the Ken tucky troops at the battle of New Orleans under General Jackson, and was appoint ed a general in the army. He was elected a representative in congress from Ken tucky from 1831 to 1833. He died May 19, 1840, in Harrisburg, Ky.
This entry shows 2 occurrences of “tucky” at the starts of lines. “tucky” is a non-word which might occur in poetry or other languages but which would almost certainly never occur in an English language dictionary of this format. Similarly, two lines begin with “ed ” (that’s ed with a space after it), and “ber “. These, too, are non-English words which would never occur in this volume, as is the line-ending occurrence of “mem “. Regex and other search-and-replace widgets handily sweep through ~320,000 lines of text in this document, replacing hundreds of these broken-word corpuscles all at once, and I’ve allowed uncounted hours of my life to vanish in this pursuit as I imagine a singular library of regex functions which could do this on newly-scanned old documents, saving busybodies like me these hours of typographical discovery.
I am, I know, only distracting myself. Instead of creating I fall into the far easier trap of re-creating. I sit at the piano and I do not compose, but I play the music of others, a re-creative task I long ago announced would no longer be among my first priorities or pursuits while at that instrument. Like most composers who announce themselves as such (if only to myself in this instance) I have little to show for my appellation. I would like to have hundreds of pages of unshared dreck, because I believe that a sufficient quantity of inferior work would clear the palette for works of some merit. This is true for writing of prose, poetry, music, any such outlet toward which I might scramble as the panic of middle-age lurches out from inside me, as the ambivalence about my merits and unanswered questions about my rejections huddle like pigeons plucking at a freshly-filled grave site.
I found something I thought was gone, something I thought had vanished into the bit-bucket of a DOS-prompt file-overwrite catastrophe which erased over 100 pages of writings and ramblings from the halcyon days of my first real job in New York. The file, called MEMOS, was begun in January of 1993, and the last rambles are from August of that year. I typed blindly into MEMOS, unable to see the words as I typed them because I hid the document from bosses and co-workers, making myself look madly busy by filling the screen with a legitimate word processing document but typing on into another file stuffed into the corner of the screen and sized down to near invisibility. It is hard to believe now but in those days I was considered a candidate for some un-named “Executive School”, a place (I deduced) intended for directionless but ambitious young people with educational degrees inappropriate for corporate but who make positive impressions on the mucky-mucks. This suggestion that I had an upwardly-mobile future (possibly without merit but meant with sincerity) inspired me to buy a wildly expensive-to-me Ascot Chang shirt, for to prepare myself for the corner office dress code and tenets of 6-figure-salary presentability. I bragged to anonymous online friends that I was on my way, baby, on my way. Aha, no such path ever materialized, which is fortunate, though I sometimes imagine that someone such as myself could be more useful in structured environments (like corporate) than in the miasmatic lifestyle at which I have arrived.
I printed out the document, sizing down the margins and printing double-sided on over 40 sheets. I mostly detest re-reading my own expository rambles, but the surprise of finding this file I thought was obliterated and the seeming chasm of 17 years makes it a little less annoying to me. I think, though, that big swaths of stuff did truly disappear, if not from this document than from another, and that still pains me as my inflated sense of self imagines that that was the masterpiece.
