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Le Bonnet Rouge
Meant to add this in with my post on free boxes: the day I put those boxes out, I took a nap and had the following dream. Wrote this to my friend Garrett, who co-starred in the dream, for whatever reason:
I had a dream yesterday with you in it. We somehow were in this big old country farm house type place and it seemed like you knew the place better than I, like you lived there or went there all the time. And a bunch of other people were there, mutual friends, and people I didn’t know. Some kind of party. You and I were sitting at this wood table and you were telling me how you guys were planning on burning this place down soon. I don’t know why. I said that you shouldn’t do it because it was a nice old place.
Then I found some almost like saint medal hidden in my coat lining, except there were three of them and they were dark green, old looking and linked together. They had an image on each side, and the images were in light relief and depicted a mythological sequence of a man fighting a lion. I remember one panel distinctly: the man standing triumphant, holding the severed head of the lion in front of his chest.
After that, I was in the kitchen/table area still and a strange man with a funny red hat started talking to me. I was basically asking him what I should do next (the dream sequence having been prompted somehow by my debut performance in the park getting cancelled that morning due to rain), and then he made a weird gesture, putting his arms up, crossed in front of his face. His cuffs were bright red like his hat and only his eyes were visible in the gap, sparkling out. Suddenly, I recognized him: “I saw you at the gas station,” I said to him. He smiled and said that the only thing I could do was to practice non-attachment. Oh, he also mentioned having learned a song or story or something from a hobo on a train (I had just been to the Hobo Film Festival a couple nights before at an oddly immaculate punk house - cute young girls sipped malt liquor to sad videos of old drunk men with lost souls riding the rails deeper into oblivion).
The dream figure’s red hat reminded me of the “bonnet rouge” of the French Revolution, or the Phrygian cap, a hat worn by former Roman slaves who had been freed by their masters:
Emancipated Roman slaves wore the Phrygian cap as an indication of their liberty. For a time, the cap was also worn in theater by any character who served as a ‘man of the people.’ According to the Revolutions de Paris, a chronicle printed during the French Revolution, the cap was ‘the symbol of the liberation from all servitudes, the sign for unification of all the enemies of despotism.’ ”
I have a number of images floating around on my computer which may mythologically amplify whoever this dream/archetypal figure is:
This also reminds me of a dream I had last summer, in which I received (in the dream, mind you) an email from the “Lord of Juggling” congratulating me on recent true life accomplishments. I’m curious to hear of other mythological references which might shed light on who this strange red-hatted drifter might be. Anybody?
May 12th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
For what it’s worth your juggler reminds me of Queen’s juggler from Innuendo. I’ve been stuck on Queen lately.
Didn’t you do a few posts about Cardinals? The birds and the churchmen if I remember correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innuendo_%28album%29
May 12th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
As it is, we are having a Hobo Film Festival of our own here in Brooklyn. We got the film from a comrade in arms who recently returned from Asheville.
As it is, I happened to have lost my Saints Medals somewhere in the city of Seattle.
You’re on your own on the red hat though.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Here’s something I found while researching Heath Ledger’s death, in regards to the psychic toll that playing the joker took on him. The links on this page are all well worth the read.
Anyway, it definitely fits in with the red hat (or head), as well as the juggling. And when you were discussing the medals, I remembered that the lion headed man is also an alchemical figure. Also, maybe lion’s head at chest level has something to do with lion-heart (merely a phrase that popped into my head, not sure what it might mean), or something heart chakra related?
May 12th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Juggling as visual music
Worth watching all 37 minutes. And I rarely give that much time to internet video.
Key comment, right at the end: “I never really know what I’m working on, they’re not ideas, they’re instincts.”
May 12th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
As it were, we parked next to a car in a garage in downtown Seattle yesterday with a bumpersticker bearing the logo of “The Red Hat Society” yesterday. A woman with a broad brimmed red hat got out of it and rode the elevator up with us. I didn’t think to look up what the hell it was all about until now.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
Oh wait one second, I have heard of those crazy ladies and their hats… I can’t remember exactly in what context.
And here’s to our old friend:
http://pollycoke.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/red-hat.jpg
May 12th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Also, Ian, check out this post:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2008...nloading-information-into-your-brain/
Note that my first link in that post is under the text “Ted talks” and the title of the page you linked to is: “TED | Talks | Michael Moschen: Juggling rhythm and motion (video)”
And tell me we’re not working with some collective intelligence of some weird variety…
May 13th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Tim, that is awesome.
There’s sort of a little story that goes with the TED links, that I figure I might as well share. I am from Monterey, California originally (where it looks like most of this TED stuff takes place), and my sister once sent me a link to the TED site on an lecture about the technology that eventually turned into Microsoft’s “Surface” table. Her comment was sort of “looks at the cool stuff going on back home” kind of thing. I thought it was an interesting technology, but didn’t really investigate the TED site further.
Then, someone posted a link here on your site to TED (involving fish, I believe, in response to a post on birdsong…), and it brought to mind that earlier experiance. Since then, I have been checking TED pretty regularly, and finding a few strange linkups to the discussions here (which I’ve posted), as well as to some of my own investigations.
So it was originally your site which got me back in touch with the whole TED thing to begin with. =)
May 13th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Hey do you remember that I once had that dream that the demi-god of free boxes visited me (and that this divine entity bore a striking resemblance to Samuel L. Jackson)?
Perhaps we are being communicated with by a pantheon of new players?
Garrett
May 13th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
I was the one who posted the link to TED. It was a link to a video showing how fish use a visual language. I’m glad you’re getting something out of the site. I like it a lot.
May 13th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
Yeah! It had the octopi in it, yes? Well, thanks for putting it up here, I’m glad to have found it again. =)
May 13th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Yeah Garrett, I totally remember that dream but didn’t make the strange FREE BOX connection between our stuff until right now… Very peculiar indeed.
We should try and do some experiments or rituals or something to communicate with this FREE BOX entity
May 13th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Also, Garrett, I have an association with something in the dream I forgot about: when he said I saw him at the “gas station” my brain keeps serving me a link to this PKD excerpt:
http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm
May 14th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Yeah, I totally thought of that same PKD bit when you mentioned it.
Okay, so how does one go about creating a ritual?
May 14th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about your dream where everybody brought their products or something out on their front porch? And a parallel dream I had (parallel in my brain anyway) where people drove their cars out to the edge of town and parked them in a big ring so as to block access in from the outside. They may have set them on fire too.