The Art of Dreaming

Thoughts on a painting by Franz Marc (from 2012).

Franz Marc, The Dream

This post is a lightly revised entry from my old blog I recently re-discovered, which I started writing in the summer leading up to my full-time employment as a private high school teacher in the fall of 2012. Noticeably, the blog entries end just as the teaching began…. Here I am the year after leaving that same job ten years later, posting my reflections once again and trying to support myself fully with my writing. Note: my youngest son is now 19 and a freshman in college, and taking kids to their weekend soccer games is long behind me.

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June 2012

I'm looking at a poster of Franz Marc's El Sueño, The Dream, hanging next to my desk in my office. I bought it many moons ago at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, hence the title in Spanish. I've always thought of it with the Spanish title, though Marc was German. It hangs on the wall next to my writing desk, and I look at it and have looked at it now on a nearly daily basis for the past twenty-something years. It is a part of me, part of mis propios sueños.

I envision the naked woman in the center of the painting surrounded by the creatures of her dreams, the two looming blue horses, the red and orange horses in the background, the wonderful lion, yellow and reared back roaring at her, the yellow house complementing the angle of its stance, the grasses soft, undulating lumps of green, peach, orange, black, a swath of red coming from beneath the woman, pouring away: blood? menstrual blood? I'm resisting researching this, reading anything at all about it. I'm an utter amateur when it comes to commenting on art, and I kind of like it that way.

When I asked my 9-year-old what he thought of the painting recently when he came into my office to find me for dinner, he said, "it doesn't look real, but I like it."
"I like it too, very much," I said.
"I like yellow," he said.
"Me too."

As a writer, I've always deeply admired what painters are able to do—to evoke such powerful emotion without any abstraction, save perhaps the title, which you don't see necessarily, where "meaning" isn't something you go hunting for the way you do in a story or novel or poem. You are more prone to sit back and just experience the work, letting the emotion of it roll over you.

But to hunt a little: what I love about expressionist art is that the emotion of the situation takes precedence and guides everything else (representation taking a back seat)—you see this in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, whose sets were designed by Marc’s contemporaries, the paranoia, fear, insanity bursting out in every single gesture of the film—those wonderful tall chairs at the police station, the “somnambulist” (who looks to me just like a post-Velvet Underground Lou Reed) those disturbing slanted windows, the painted walls/sets, half real, half overtly not "real."

In Marc, the basic colors, the fundamental shapes, the way all the lines of the painting descend on the central figure, all those gentle arcs of the fields set against the stark lines of the house, the lion…all clearly magnify the central, emotional energy of the work. Tone is everything, which is true in all good art, but in works like these, that statement really rings true.

This dream is one where elemental forces spin around the central, sleeping woman. There's a certain yin/yang, or perhaps anima/animus—the masculine lion, the feminine horses—dynamic at play. There is turmoil. So many colors and lines bear down on her—the house, the only thing that isn't rounded in some way, the lion paired with that, both in coloration and in his more angular depiction. Does the house have something to do with human constructs, all those things that contain us as human beings, arbitrary paradigms—jobs, car repairs, plumbing problems…what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "average everydayness"? Is the lion's roar associated with all that since he is so powerful, so dangerous? Are those deeper, more “primordial” forces—another Heidegger term—staring these down? In our dreams, do we visit the landscape that moves beyond human-structures into one of “primordiality,” toward our deeper, truer selves? And if, as Carl Jung would argue, the psyche yearns for balance of masculine/feminine, logic/art, then the blood-red swath seeming to come from her seems right, though it could also speak to fertility, to this dance of forces within our subconscious as the nesting place of creativity, the mother of invention (apologies, Frank Zappa).

And I think the horses are winning in the painting, the lion retreating (he is so small compared to them and leaning away). Perhaps in our dream-place/dream-self we move into a more authentic place, a place I'm trying always to nurture with my writing, a place that is all too easy to neglect with bills to pay and summer plans to be made, and the dog needing his flea repellent, and then there is another wave of soccer matches to get everyone to this coming weekend…. The lion roars, the big yellow house bears down, and those lovely blue horses somehow hold everything at bay.

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