An essay about Joyce Mansour

An ordinary dream

I have been invited to a pub event in the museum attic, but I can't seem to get ready for it.

(Already within the dream, I connect the process of getting ready for the pub event with finalising a postface for a swedish edition of Joyce Mansour's Julius Caesar which I am doing these days. But I remarkably fail to connect it with larger projects that I am also supposed to be finalising.)

So I am walking around in the exhibit, they have already called for closing, I am eager to help, to shut the lights off, but I am not leaving, I am walking around there obsessively reading the exhibit signs in order both to proofread them and to extract information for my Mansour essay, over and over again, in the dark. In the darkness I am bumping into things, and in the dark I can only imagine how it would look to visitors if I would start suddenly bleeding profusely from the bruises.

A female security guard is working hard to get me out, and she keeps turning the lights back on, going on about the statistical correlation between darkness and flashers, so in order to eradicate flashing, a program is now implemented of zero tolerance against darkness, all streets, squares and parks should from now on be lit during the dark hours, and all public buildings too, and once they find a technical solution to it, so will the forests. In spite of my repetitive-obstructive obsession, I have nothing to counter this overly depressing tirade with, and so I allow her to push me out.

But then just outside the exhibition hall several friends of mine are sitting, having coffee and obviously also resisting the pub call. The only thing I need to do before I can finally go there is to change my clothes. So I undress, but I am completely unable to get dressed again. It is not embarrassing to expose myself naked, but it certainly is to display such inability. I keep walking around the pile of clothes cursing and trying, cursing and trying, but nothing happens except that after a few rounds I notice blood is dripping on the floor. I shouldn't be menstruating since I'm not female. My friend Jonas helps me out, he impersonates me and offers an excuse "Oh, I must have cut myself on my bike on the way here". As he is dressed (in a ridiculous biking outfit) the problem seems solved, and I can relax, sitting back and watching the long stream of danse macabre up to the attic.

MF