Dream about lesbian ladies

Dream about lesbian ladies    

            Two lesbian ladies lived together in Boston.  They were both writers.  A man was sent to interview them.  The ladies had a sitting room where they met people who had come to interview them.  Apparently, they were very famous.  In the sitting room, there was an elegant carved wooden tables, perhaps, a French antique.  On the table, there were several jewel-encrusted staplers.  It was the policy of these women that they not submit to an interview unless both were present in the room.  Then, they demanded the opportunity to review and edit any transcript of what they had said.  The table with the staplers with other nice things – paperweights, expensive pens, parchments and bonded paper – was where these transcripts were edited.

            I was impressed that these women had a room specifically dedicated to interviews with their public.  On the wall of the room, there were many very expensive and beautiful time-pieces, clocks with golden hands and ruby numerals.  I was aware that the clocks were always about to transform into something else.

            Under the name, Janet Malcom, the ladies had published an article (written, however, by only one of them) about “baroque change.’  The article was the reason I had come to see them.

            Outside, in a kind of plaza or terrace, there was a monument to their love.  It consisted of two rings engraved on a tablet of precious metal or fine marble.  The rings intersected like a Venn diagram.

            Beneath the rings, there were five cylinders of crystal suspended.  When you struck them, for instance, with a car key, they emitted a clear ringing sound.  This was true of the two or three crystals to the left.  The two right crystals were mere shards of jewel and they were tuned to a frequency that was too high to hear.  When you struck them, you had to lean your cheek against the crystal to understand that they were vibrating.  Perhaps, you could sense the vibration in your jowls. 

            When I awoke the German word urbar was repeating itself over and over again in my mind.

Notes

I had been reading Gert Hofmann’s Die kleine Stechardin.  Michael Hofmann, Gert’s son translated the book.  I encountered a word that I didn’t know urbar – I checked Michael Hofmann’s translation which used “fruitful” for the word.

Janet Malcolm is a writer with the New Yorker.  She is the author of a famous book about Freud’s papers.  But the name is also a combination of Malcolm Gladwell, another New Yorker writer (The Tipping Point) and Janet Flanner, known as “Genet” who wrote the “Letter from Paris” column for the same magazine many years ago.