Crazy Stable

Collage by students of the Brooklyn Museum Studio Art Program, 2006

The Stablemistress will be taking a break from blogging, and from the Stable, this week, so turn for solace to some newly renovated links at left to the infamous Bloggers of Brooklyn. Wouldn't my dear Walt have relished the blogosphere? I mean, can you imagine the number of posts the old darling could have cranked out in a week? And at least a third of them would have been at least this good:

To-day, I should say—defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions—an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours—fully aware of all that can be said on the other side—I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken—the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords—namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city—city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings.

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days: Human and Heroic New York

Yes, a lot can happen in 30 years. Who then could have imagined that the most striking absence in this picture would be anything other than the skyline's galaxy of electric lights?

Photo: New York Times

 And yes, I remember precisely where I was when the lights went out--at home with my family in Stuyvesant Town, on vacation before my senior year at NYU. My dad had just blown a circuit using a power tool, and was replacing the fuse; as he withdrew his hand from the fuse box, in a moment of apocalyptic horror, he looked out our seventh-floor kitchen window to see Manhattan go dark, convinced that he had somehow done something unimaginably wrong. For years, I ribbed him that it had all, indeed, been his fault.

Horror stories to recount? Hardly. The worst of it, for us, was schlepping down seven flights of stairs to fetch buckets of water from an open hydrant; we quickly lost our pressurized water supply, and for the duration my hands smelt vaguely of the raw chicken I had been cutting up when the lights went out. We lit candles, called friends, listened to the news on a transistor radio...but I don't recall any of us feeling a particularly sharp sense of dread over the looting and fires sweeping parts of the city. Although we lived steps from Alphabet City on the Lower East Side, we never set foot on the other side of 14th Street, and Brooklyn or Harlem might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

In fact, it felt like a bit of rough fun, much like most of that "Summer of Sam" now being mythologized as a ghastly nadir in the city's life. I was young and commuting on foot to college in Manhattan, "the city," after a sheltered girlhood in suburban Queens. Although my parents spoke with weary nostalgia about a "nicer" city back in the day, a New Yorker cartoon city where ladies always wore gloves and men always wore hats, I had never known anything but the gritty streets and foul-smelling, graffiti-covered subways around me. However far into the mud it had sunk, New York City was mine to discover, even if it meant sitting under the yellow glare of a bare bulb on the old LL train, its wicker seats sprung, a fan whirring weakly overhead. Once I changed trains to uptown, there was Broadway, and the Cloisters, and Altmans, and Gilbert and Sullivan at the old Jan Hus Theater. Most of all, there was Lincoln Center and the ballet.

I lived, slept, ate and drank ballet back in that city set to explode in flames the night of July 13. I took class at the old American Ballet Theatre school on West 66th Street, got on line at the Met (in conspicuous bun and leotard) with my friends for standing room at 7 a.m. on Saturdays, and thought nothing of standing for four straight weekend performances when our demigod, Nureyev, was in town. (We all loved Barishnikov, of course, but I was a Rudi girl.) I was excruciatingly lonely--the decade of disco and "Boogie Nights" was a terrible time to be young, single, and chaste, and most of the guys in my milieu were gay anyway. (Soon, most would also be dead, Rudi included.) But there was no loneliness so profound that "Swan Lake," "Romeo and Juliet," or, especially, "Giselle" couldn't banish. I have always loathed that song from A Chorus Line, "Everything is Beautiful at the Ballet," because it made my salvation into something so escapist and sappy. Besides, the interplay of studio, stage and street--the perfection of bodies lined up at a barre, horns honking below, summer heat warming up legs, icy air-conditioned red-velvet Met and suffocating IRT--seemed like a seamless tapestry, the most thrilling place on earth.

And so, although I lived in the heart of the city, I watch the clip reels and chin-stroking recaps of the terrible Summer of 77 with a wry smile. The Son of Sam was a mere diversion (we made great sport in journalism class the following year of the lurid Daily News headlines, particulary "SAM SLEEPS," a jailhouse exclusive shot of, yes, Berkowitz snoozing). If New York was on the ropes, my friends and I failed to notice. I turned 20 at summer's end, and the whole world seemed to be waiting for me. If you had told me that world included Brooklyn, of course, I would have thought you quite mad; Brooklyn was a foreign land on fire. Happy Friday the Thirteenth, and here's to changing luck!

Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded,

not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland

Copyright © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP)

I set great store by dreams, too much store, I tend to think--but I feel vindicated by this article in the New York Times about  what Carl Jung called "big dreams," the ones we remember all our lives:

“Big dreams are transformative,” Roger Knudson, director of the Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at Miami University of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. The dreaming imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, he said. It has a “poetic creativity” that connects the dots and “deforms the given,” turning scattered memories and emotions into vivid, experiential vignettes that can help us to reflect on our lives.

The article highlights "back to life" or "visitation" dreams of dead loved ones, but I'm particularly intrigued by the "big dreams" I've had over the past 20 years about the CrazyStable, as I try to grapple with its enormity. Given our history, visitations are a frequent part of these house dreams. I would love to hear housebloggers' best (or worst, or weirdest) House Dreams; do post below and share them! Here are my house dreams that have "deformed the given," the ones that remain as vivid (for better or worse) as the morning I awoke from them:

* We have gutted and sheetrocked the downstairs "tool room," but have managed to shut my mother up in the cavity walls. She is pounding on the walls from the inside, muffled but clearly outraged. This is disconcerting because, even in the dream, I know she is dead. (The day after this dream was not a good day.)

* This is a whole dream-genre: We discover new rooms in the house, and sometimes even an entire new wing. Typically, these "hidden" rooms are dusty and untouched from Edwardian times (and look like they belong to a deserted old English manor house); they are suffused with a chalky pale daylight. Once there was a big room with a central fireplace, massive carven mantlepieces, and gargoyle-laden sarcophagi. Another time, it was a huge white-tiled high-ceilinged kitchen and pantry accessible via a long-forgotten back staircase. The dominant emotion in these dreams is, "Cool--but how are we going to afford to renovate all this?"

* Weirdest "forgotten room" dream: We find a series of huge upstairs rooms with fascinating antique furniture left behind by the Changs, plus one of their (really-did-have them) commercial refrigerators. I open the fridge, which remarkably has been plugged in all these years, and there is a lion-headed goldfish swimming weakly in a big pickle jar. It is almost entirely milk-white, its gold color having faded after years in darkness, like a cave fish; it is on its last few molecules of oxygen. And even in the dream, I realize instantly that I have rescued, barely, some part of myself.

* Most delightful dream: I am showing people around the CrazyStable, and as I do so, the place proliferates, throws off wings, dormers, colonnades with balustrades, until it has achieved Versailles-like sprawling proportions. From a central vantage point, surrounded by CGI-like splendor, I sweep my hand across the prospect and declare to my dazzled visitors: And there you have it, folks--our little $150,000 house! (They are speechless with amazement and envy.)

* Coolest X-files-est dream, getting back to "visitations": My dad is home from the hospital in our house, in hospice care, weak but not in pain. (In reality, he died of leukemia in Mount Sinai Hospital a year before we bought the house.) I check on him, and he is about to fall peacefully asleep, but mutters, "In the morning, I'll show you how to repair that dish." I shrug, since there's no broken dish in sight, bemused that even in medicated decline he is thinking about fixing things, his old self. Upon awakening, I am told by Spouse that one of the cats' dishes, my favorite, has been broken into two perfect halves during the night. Okay, dad! Got it!

Now, this doesn't even touch the important category of Gardening Dreams--that will have to wait for another day. Renovators of the blogosphere, what are your House-Related 'Big Dreams'? (Tell me I'm not the only one who has 'em, please!)

Image: 'The Nightmare' by Henri Fuseli (1781) meets 'Tool Time'