with artists

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you -- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you." --Monet

Today was spent with artists...visual artists mostly, some writers, listening to them talk about their work, looking at stuff in their studios, drinking in their sentences and words about how they were doing what they were doing and what they were thinking about as they were making their videos, installations, paintings, performance pieces, short stories, plays and it was like running to the ocean after the whole year away--the first swim, the cold cutting your skin, the salty waves whooshing into nostrils as you stroke and dive and surf them, never wanting to leave, your brain exploding with the words. It was like that. It was more. The technologies--cameras and paint and brushes and pencils and computers and stuffed deer heads and I thought about my long time away. Then I read something I'd written a few years ago--capturing a dream:

...somewhere in a neighborhood -- on a lawn, trees and houses and we're talking and the future is an issue and the atmosphere is charged in a science-fiction-y kind of way -- thinking about the future and a goddess being only not a goddess but a woman with some kind of power says we need to find out about memory, about how long it takes for a memory to fade and to do that she says you can go up into the atmosphere toward the universe to the moon and circle it and so i do arms out i fly i take off with a leap straight up through the layers and higher it gets and white and clouds but like fog or haze and cold but i dont feel that just the sense of flying and i reach the moon and circle it and then i return and because we think it takes a decade for a memory to dissipate i come back to where i had been -- the same lawn but 10 years have gone by and everything is changed houses gone people gone or aged and i walk through the streets the yards the town others are gone but not me and i wake up but not really in this state of amazement....

this is an old dream not only my dream the dream of flying and i like that i found it i had forgotten about this dream and that i found it today when i went swimming again.