Some New Year housekeeping.

Today I will invent an ancient culture that opens its drawers on the last day of each year and I will follow in its suit. In truth, I have already begun writing a fable of this strange land, the land of gnomes and their ale, a land of aged Roman cellars in where modern-day Austria crosses over into the Czech hills, a land where among other strange customs the gnomes cast their lanterns – paper maches of unbearable lightness, lanterns of laughter and forgetting – on the very last day of their calendar. But each story has its time and place and perhaps that is a story for the new year. Stories seem to have a way of making friends and also foes out of even the emptiest of auditoriums, most often in a near-comical tragedy not a soul in their seat realizing that they are meant to do quite neither.

And so, in the call of cultural tradition I have opened up my drawers, of course keeping personal tradition in mind – belatedly. I am also considering putting up some dreams, but do not know where. Perhaps they deserve a separate space, and although I do not want to want to make a typist of myself the dreams too need to be organized and catalogued. The black books get murky, words get lost, thoughts and images forgotten.

Over some time I have gotten into the habit of writing down my dreams and would recommend for anybody reading this to experiment – for there is no greater clarity than in the pre-sunrise twilight, letting your hand race across with the taste of that just dreamt and the eyes still closed.

Dreams somehow have always been easier for me to write, it seems that in my mind, somewhere in me they happen whereas the present is at best only understood, most often in a lengthy and not a highly attractive way. With the dream, however, even if the most spare and random details are noted, the dream is saved, it becomes a tangible dome I can step back into and recreate fully, or even better – build from. Over the past few months I have been writing down my dreams nearly every day, and this should make for an interesting project.

But that is all ahead. For now, the page is open, the holidays over, the snow on its way. It is all superficial of course - the year rolls over nothing with nothing. Still, I cannot help but feel a childlike bounce in me, a feeling somehow that this year is going to be big, huge – there is so much of something – and the fact that it is unknown makes bouncing all the more irresistible.

And so I smile, the gnomes bounce, the village dances, the caves echo with the clacking of their wooden shoes, the swinging of their caps, the sliding of the mugs, the banging on the tables and the deep
thin
smell
of their ale.

Prost!