A New God

8/21/07

Author Tim Powers is like unto a god to me. The man can drink more Coke during an hour and a half lecture than I can drink Pepsi in a morning. All I can say is, "Wow. I am not worthy, I am not worthy."


Workshop Tuesday Morning Dream

Snow. A field of snow. And a stage set with a fence perimeter defining a house. In the house lives an old woodcutter, almost a Jepetto and his son. I he's a woodcutter or a wood carver. His son helps around the house. It's time for sleep. And the son is playing with all of his toys, which are played by a chorus of dancers.

The house is a long rectangle. An inner rectangle of toys sits inside the outer rectangle defined by the planks of the fence (which are the walls of the house).

Att this point, the story is like a ballett. It's time for the child go to go to bed, and his father is reading him a story. The toys are up and dancing while the father tells his story. But the story ends, and the toys slowly go to their places on the inner rectangle and sit down.

Just before the light is to go out, the son (who is played by a boy sopranno) stands up and sleepily recites, "echo echo amalac" and the towys twitch back to a kind of half life.

But the boy wants to be good, he knows that its time for bed, so the toys slouch back to rest. But the air is pregnant with the sense of a spell half completed, half halted.

Just then, a stranger comes out of the stormy night. The boy quickly rises and puts together a chair and table for the stranger. The father says, "Say with us tonight. The boy can sleep over here," and he carries the boy to the corner where the toys are sitting. (Well OK, the toys are everywere on the set...) He carries the boy to the other end of the long rectange of toys as if the boy were to sleep in a large over stuffed chair.

The lights go down.

For a moment in this section of the dream, things turn intt cartoon mode. Lighting and thunder send blue shadows across the floor. The crack of thunder and lightning wakes the boy. Hides under the blanket thrown over the chair.

The toys return to life, and somehow they take the boy to a ghostly toy world. Or faerie land. The walls of the house no longer contain them, and the Father (and the travelling stranger?) can no longer see him.

Something about a vase or a cubit long glass bead. (And here's an odd waking life coincidence: my Workshop item was a bead of yellow turquois.)

The head toy is the mayor clown. He names and greets all the toy citizens, and the boy is one. They seem to peramublate around the rectangle, while the mayor names them. The inner rectangle is a grassy sward.

The boy questions the mayor, and is rebuked. "I know I say exactly what people are. And I say exactly what I'm supposed to say. Do not question me."

So the boy is banished into toy world. He learns to skate and mountain climb. He becomes a snowflake and falls with the other toy snowflakes.

Meanwhile, his father (and mother?) are looking for him.

-- end of dream --