Sweet Dreams (40 Years Ago!)

In 1981, Eurythmics released a debut album, “In the Garden,” that went nowhere, but its follow-up in 1983, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” unlocked America for them. The video for the title track was a constant presence during MTV’s early years. Stewart and Lennox were suddenly everywhere, glaring mysteriously from magazine covers, staring from videos in arch amusement….The success of “Sweet Dreams,” the fourth in a line of underperforming singles from their sophomore album, surprised everyone, especially them. “Obviously ‘Sweet Dreams’ is just a huge life-changer,” Lennox says…”it’s just played endlessly. ‘Sweet Dreams’ isn’t even a conventional song … it’s like a mantra. It just repeats and repeats. It doesn’t have that structure. But there’s something in the song that people clearly identify with, whatever they’re doing, you know, they’re having a celebration or somebody scored a goal or it’s a birthday.”

—  Allison Stewart, Annie Lennox beguiled us in the MTV age. Now she calms us down online. Nearly 40 years after Eurythmics hit it big with ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),’ the singer keeps her chin up in a world of anxieties (The Washington Post, June 30, 2022)

T.G.I.F.: You inhale the soft cool night

7/15/44 [New York.] You have to enjoy the weather always. Walking home from Sixty-First Street on Second Avenue, eleven beautiful black blocks. (The moon is not, the lights are, you are, your feet with the spring in them, this is youth, now!) You inhale the soft cool night, you gaze on the lighted bar doorways fondly. Your shoes, for once, are comfortable. Your head is filled with a number of things… with the youth’s grudging appreciation of the splendid night, and with the consciousness of health, future, potency. Breathe deep! Your lungs are still functioning perfectly, your thighs do not shake too much, your calves are resilient, your toes eager. Every muscle is obedient (taut for an instant, then couchantly relaxed), every dream will come true.

 Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)— Patricia Highsmith, Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995


Photo: Mike Kononov via unsplash

Lightly Child, Lightly.

(He) lived a Yeatsian dream life where peace came dropping slow.

— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath


Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 5:51 am, March 4, 2021. 32° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Sunday Morning

we touch each other.

how?

with wings that beat…

— Rainer Maria Rilke, in an inscription to Marina Tsvetaeva, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke


Photo: DK. Gull. 6:56 am, February 14, 2021. 28° F, feels like 20° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.

Lightly Child, Lightly.

You can never have too much sky.

You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.

—Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street


Notes:

  • Photo: DK & Daybreak. Feb 11, 2020. 6:25 am. 21° F, feels like 14° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Quote: Thank you Beth @ [Alive On All Channels]
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

I looked at the photograph he had shown me, the shadowy ridged declivity in the blasted planetary surface…I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces.

— Rachel Cusk, Transit (Picador; December 19, 2017)


Notes:

  • Photo: DK. Daybreak. 6:10 am, February 3, 2021.  27° F., feels like 16° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

Lightly Child, Lightly

Life on Earth is quite a bargain.
Dreams, for one, don’t charge admission.
Illusions are costly only when lost.
The body has its own installment plan.

And as an extra, added feature,
you spin on the planets’ carousel for free,
and with it you hitch a ride on the intergalactic blizzard,
with times so dizzying
that nothing here on Earth can even tremble.

Just take a closer look:
the table stands exactly where it stood,
the piece of paper still lies where it was spread,
through the open window comes a breath of air,
the walls reveal no terrifying cracks
through which nowhere might extinguish you.

— Wisława Szymborska, from “Here”


Notes:

  • Photo: Madame Grunlich. Quote: Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

 

 

Saturday Morning

I sat on my patio, wrapped in a blanket…when I noticed that my room was not on the ground floor but on the subfloor beneath, making it closer to the edge where the beach began…I turned on the radio and Nina Simone was singing I Put a Spell on You.  The seals were silent, and I could hear the waves in the distance, winter on the West Coast. I sank into bed and slept heavily.

~ Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey (Alfred A. Knopf, September 24, 2019)


Photo: Dream Inn Santa Cruz, CA by Angelo DeSantis

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

“So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

I’d never heard that question before, hovering close to cliché and thumping me with its gravity at the same time…

“What do you think of the moment before you sleep?”…

“Why don’t you tell me about a dream?”…

“The dream is asking you the same question as I am, because it’s the only question . . .”

~ A. K. Benjamin, from his new book titled Let Me Not Be Mad: My Story of Unraveling Mind (Dutton, June 11, 2019)


Photo: (via poppins-me)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

I wake from a dream,
reach towards day as it hatches,
its tiny beak presses against
the delicate shell of sky.
Today I might learn to fly.

~ Christine Valters Paintner, “Wings” in Dreaming of Stones: Poems


Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call


Notes:

Saturday Afternoon

I went to the kitchen to start making lunch, but no sooner had I picked up a knife than I realized I was no longer ravenously hungry. Instead, I was very sleepy. I got a blanket, stretched out on the living room sofa, and promptly drifted off. I had a dream, a short one. It was clear and very vivid. But I couldn’t remember anything about it. Just that it was clear and vivid. It felt as though a fragment of real life had slipped into my sleeping mind by mistake. Then the moment I awoke, it fled like a quick-footed animal, leaving no trace behind.

~ Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel. (October 9, 2018)


Photo: Yourtango

Flight AA2632 to DFW. And Dreamin’ of Just One Time.

5:15 A.M. Monday Morning.

Terminal B LaGuardia Airport. Not America’s finest example of its greatness or its Might. Dark. Dingy. Beyond Stale. Earning its status as the Worst Airport in the Country. Dead last in surveys. Sad, really.

Lines are backing up at Security, including TSA pre-check.

One hour and 5 minutes to boarding: Flight AA2632 to DFW.

I clear security.

And I walk.

  • AA2126. Boston. 6:00 a.m. Sit in the stands at a Red Sox game.
  • AA4752. Washington. 6:00 a.m. Sit on the steps at Lincoln Memorial.
  • AA4527. Atlanta. 6:05 a.m. Lounge in the Georgia Aquarium.

What if. Just what if. Just one time. You call it in sick. A Sick Day. What’s that? You walk back out of the terminal, stroll up to the American Airlines ticket counter, pull out your credit card, pay full price for a ticket and…take off…to…anywhere else. Like take a day trip. By yourself. To anywhere else. Turn off your cellphone(s). And disappear, for one day. Off Grid. Just one time. [Read more…]

Salute! Impossible, not to smile. (120 sec)


Stick with it to the end…

Riding Metro North. One Car Short.

Thursday morning.
33°F. Feels like 23°F.
Out the door at 4:50 am to catch the 5:01.

Dark.

Directly across the street: new Neighbors. Young and DINK.  First things first. No curtains up, yet bright, white lights were carefully hand strung and evenly distributed across their bushes. The evergreens throw shadows on the front door. I pause. What was that? That softening, that load lightening ever so slightly. ‘Tis the season.

I board train. No open seats. At 5:01 a.m.?  Conductor announces that the train is one car short and apologizes. $15.25 for a one-way Peak ticket to Grand Central (Yes, Peak at 5:01 am.)  $15.25 and you get the privilege of standing. And standing for 55 minutes. Sigh.

I stand in the aisle, as the vestibule overflows with commuters. I set my bag down between my legs, grab the seat support, being careful not to brush against the passenger sitting in the seat.  I hover over him. He feels it. Nobody likes this.

We’re five minutes into the commute. I’m restless. I’m tired. I’m anxious. I’m not going to make it. [Read more…]

T.G.I.F.


Notes: Just Chillin’ by street photographer Tom Rothery on UPSP (via Newthom)

T.G.I.F.

So I say to you.

This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:

Like a tiny drop of dew,
or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.

— Buddha, from the Diamond Sūtra


Notes:

  • Diamond Sūtra: “A copy of the Chinese version of Diamond Sūtra, found among the Dunhuang manuscripts in the early 20th century by Aurel Stein, was dated back to 11 May 868. It is, in the words of the British Library, “the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book.” (Source: Wiki)
  • Photo (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)

How to describe the way these two waves of reality, the world and dreams, meet, do battle

Gosia-janik

How to describe the way these two waves of reality, the world and dreams, meet, do battle, fail to reach agreement, conclude short-lived treaties that are immediately broken, how at dawn they stare at one another incomprehendingly, begin to build bridges again by evening, and then once more turn furiously upon each other, with a passion mixing love and hate, and afterward, drift to sleep by the side of a highway leading nowhere, on an embankment where weeds grow with their heady scent.

~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay (April 4, 2017)


Notes:

Riding Metro North. Est-ce-réel?

real-true.jpg

It came Monday afternoon, an Amazon order. Tall, soft and plastic, the kind that you would see end up with other marine debris choking the life out of Nemo in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Calm is stenciled in 80 point font on the cylindrical container. “Natural Vitality Natural Calm Calmful Sleep Magnesium Anti Stress Extra Sleep Support, Organic, Wildberry, 16 oz.”

Bullsh*t. No chance this works but desperate people need to take desperate…

“Natural Vitality Natural Calm Calmful.”

Seriously? Really? Who writes their copy? What idiot would buy something with this lead?

I yank off the seal, tilt, then look down inside. The soft, white pillowy substance slides to one side and then the other. Contents may settle. Product sold by weight not volume“. It has settled below the half way mark. $28.49. Bullsh$t. Shysters. At least get it above halfway. [Read more…]

Lightly child, lightly.


Notes:

  • Quote Source: Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (via Hidden Sanctuary)
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
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