Dreams

Oliver Shaw

July 30, 2024

‘All writers are bums, I murmured. May I be counted among you one day’ – Patti Smith, M Train, p. 193

All writers are bums, I thought. May I also be counted amongst them one day. You can’t write and not be a bum. I’ve met people like that and they aren’t real writers. They like to think they can have their coffee hot and their writing deep. But it’s one or the other, we all know that.

Patti Smith writes in M Train about drinking lots of coffee and walking aimlessly. Once altered state she uses her magic power to observe the world and write down what she sees, hears, feels or imagines; sometimes from a dream, from memory and often from the mundane.

‘I sit before Zak’s peerless coffee. Overhead the fans spin, feigning the four directions of a traversing weather vane. High winds, cold rain, or the threat of rain; a looming continuum of calamitous skies that subtly permeate my entire being. Without noticing I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue’ (25).

How often do we avoid melancholia or mistake it for depression? I’ve moved to live by the sea recently and I can see that I had been mistaking my own sense of self as depressive rather than what is truer, melancholic. The sea here is melancholic, somehow, there is always the threat of rain as the colour of the ocean turns into the colour of the sky, it’s always upside down, just like thoughts in the morning. That’s why I’m writing this: to get them down and to speak to you. I’m living alone with my cat again, which is wonderful, but it’s also good to speak to someone.

‘Not all dreams need to be realized. That’s what Fred used to say’ (86).

Patti writes so beautifully about the love of her life: Fred Sonic Smith. She treats this man with the type of kindness you can only imagine comes from a butterfly kiss or something. I long to be loved by someone like that; don’t we all? And I suppose my melancholia or the sea’s melancholia is a good teacher of that; be quiet, be gentle, everything changes; you can love.

Thinking about dreams as Fred used to say to Patti: I really love that. Not all dreams need to be realised.

It reflects the idea of all writer’s being bums, doesn’t it. In some ways we are just dreamers, melancholic dreamers, and that’s okay. I’ve known too many artists who are too hard on themselves, creating a kind of depression out of the sadness of not realising their dreams. To hell with that. To hell with the noise of late capitalism’s everything can be realised nonsense. We dream and that in itself is an active thing. What do you think the ocean does all day? And those birds? And that sky?

Wake up, go for a walk, dream on. They don’t all need to be realised.