Hanging on to a Dream (or Two)

    Another 1966 gem, covered nicely by The Nice in 1969

Catching up here to a couple of dreams I had in August that continue to harass me and demand that I document them before they fade into the unreachable back corridors of memory.

DREAM THE FIRST: I'm on a city bus, present-day, and I notice an attractive young woman in the seat across from me. She sneezes, then coughs, rather moistly, then sneezes again. 

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she says, turning toward me. "It's just this stupid cold. It's not you-know-what, honest."

I chuckle softly, and try to put her at ease, and—why not?—ingratiate myself a bit. "I have extra Kleenex here, if that will help."

"Sure, sure, thanks so much. There's never enough when you have one of these runny-nose colds. I'm glorious, by the way."

Yes, you are, indeed, I say to myself. "I'm sorry—you're glorious?"

"No, it' s this stupid cold, my voice... I'm Glory."

"Glory? As in Hope and Glory?"

 "No, no, it's Gloria. G-L-O-R-I-A, GLORIA. Like the song?"

"Of course. And I'll bet you've heard that a few times."

"Many, many," she says with a stage grimace. "And you are...?"

"Peter. And I'm sorry to say this is my stop coming up." I press the bell and rise to stand up.

""Good to meet you, Petie."

"Peter."

"I know. Just joking. Thanks for the Kleenex, and sorry for being so sick."

"Not at all. Hope you feel better."

Another glorious Gloria, 1964

And that was that. An encounter that took likely only a few seconds of dream time but nevertheless made a vivid and pleasant impression on my first few moments of wakefulness. At my age, most of my dreams are just irrational fragments strung together so randomly that I seem more of a spectator than a participant. So when I have one that manages to mimic stable reality for a short time, wherein I actually meet someone, and she introduces herself, well, that gets my attention—as you might expect.

As I groggily pondered my meeting this sick girl named Gloria, I sensed a sort of ping in my brain from the pairing of "sick" and "Gloria." Where had I heard those sounds together before? Sick, Gloria, sick . . . sic, it was Latin—Sic transit gloria mundi, that was the phrase. Thus passes away the glory of the world. A warning uttered to popes at their coronation, with origins perhaps in the crowning of Roman emperors. 

Then I got the pun. I'd met her on a bus, i.e., transit. Who knows, maybe even on a Monday. But I was a bit deflated to discover in the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary that this pun was already common currency ("Gloria threw up on the bus on Monday"). Still, it was genuinely new to me, and delicious as it was, it made me speculate whether this G-L-O-R-I-A might have an S-T-A-N-Z-A in her circle of acquaintances.

The Urban Dictionary also appended a rather unexpected sentence: "The term is Templar-Masonic in origin, and has multiple occult connotations and uses among authors, poets, secret societies, and other intellectual oddballs." B-I-N-G-O. Stanza's fingerprints all over it.

*****

DREAM THE SECOND: This initially seemed destined for the category of paper route dream. I inherited my brother's paper route when I was 11 and kept it for five years, after he'd had it for seven. We've both been visited (or plagued) by dreams of it ever since. Mine usually involve having forgotten to do the route for years, and having to resume while being as nonchalant as possible about my negligence.

This one was different, in that I was only visiting the old route and reacquainting myself. Back in the day, I had always started at the formidable red-brick Journal-Pioneer building, where I picked up my papers (generally 90‒100 of them; the route was ridiculously large). That building now houses a splendid artisanal coffeehouse called Samuel's, after Samuel Holland, who originally surveyed PEI in the late 18th century.

"Hi, I'm here to pick up my papers? About 50 years' worth, I figure..."

Picking up coffee and a snack there (no papers), I sauntered up Central Street to catch that portion of my route. As some of the housing configuration had changed over the decades, I became momentarily confused, but was able to reorient myself at the corner of Schurman Avenue when I saw the big apartment building—the only one on my route—and was amazed that it was still there.

Back in the real world that morning, I checked Google maps, and the building was still there. When I saw it onscreen, I recalled its name back in paper route days: Palmer Apartments.

Then I was able to put it together. My little journey started with Samuel and ended with Palmer. Samuel Palmer I remembered as one of the young "Ancients," artists who flocked around William Blake in his last years and absorbed much of his unique energy and outlook. I first encountered him in William Gaunt's Arrows of Desire, the book I found lying on a shelf in the Quinto Bookshop on Charing Cross Road in October 2000. The book whose frontispiece had a photo of Blake's birthplace at the corner of Carnaby and Broadwick Streets.

photo from Gaunt, 1956

I didn't remember much about Palmer except that the years during and shortly after his time with Blake were the happiest and most fruitful of his life, and his later years were filled with unhappiness and frustration as he was unable to sustain his artistic sense of self. It's not everyone who can live up to Blake's famous dictum from his prophetic book Jerusalem, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd to another Mans." So Palmer's story serves both as evidence of the inspiring power of Blake's art and personality and as a cautionary tale about the need to hold fast to such inspiration and not allow it to dissolve in the cares of the world.

Jerusalem was on my mind, of course, because Gaunt's title comes from Blake's preface to Milton, later set to music as the hymn "Jerusalem":

            Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
            Bring me my Arrows of desire:
            Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
            Bring me my Chariot of fire!

And of course that last line also provided the title for 1981's Best Picture, Chariots of Fire, a story about faith and endeavour.

So it was not surprising that I was thinking of that hymn two days later when we passed a car with vanity plate JRSALEM. Well, that's a first, I said to myself. 

A dream come true, in a typically quirky, esoteric Stanza way.

Then I said to myself, Is that it? Or is there more? And Stanza replied, There's always more. . .

Exploiting the Wonders of the Web, I decided to look for a contemporary image of Gaunt's frontispiece. What I found could be said to have unexpected and unmistakable Blakean overtones:

"So all Religions & as all similars have one source.
The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius."
Blake, All Religions Are One (1788)

Pure coincidence, of course, as True Religion is, or was at the time of this photo, a designer jeans company headquartered in the US. In an L.A. Times interview in 2009, founder Jeff Lubell explained how he settled on the brand name: "To me it meant there’s many religions in the world, but there’s only one real religion—and that’s people. And all the people in the world wear jeans."

Sure they do, Jeff. Just not jeans as expensive as yours.

Nor does it end there. There is another site claimed as Blake's birthplace now, a block of contemporary flats at 8 Marshall St., farther down Broadwick. Who knows, perhaps Blake himself appeared to the real estate developer in a timely dream to confirm this. Not as picturesque as our earlier site, but it does have twin commemorative plaques:

Plaques say, "'William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in a house
which stood on this site." A less Blakean vista would be hard to imagine.

So, which option do we favour for the designation of Blake's birthplace? Personally, I think True Religion beats out Brutalist Architecture any day of the week. But let's end our dream with one more photo of Gaunt's site, this one, by the looks of it, predating the 1950s:

Shall we take this as a sign?