In My Dweems
We Fwy

Creative nonfiction
by Stephen Mead

“In my dweems we fwy,” is a quote written on the cover of Joni Mitchell’s 1979 album Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. The cover also features Joni as an African American, a fact I did not realize until years later, when I read a Musician magazine interview with Joni where the late great jazz artist Charles Mingus calls Joni “one nervy broad” for pulling off such a racial pigmentation change.

I did an Internet search attempting to locate the source of the quote “In my dweems we fwy,” but had no success. It sounds like lines from Peter Pan or an old Hollywood romance such as Now Voyager. The fact that I keep hearing it being it said by a voice that sounds like Tweety Bird, though, causes the horizons of my mind to enlarge with cartoon balloon after balloon. Here comes Bullwinkle bouncing with Rocky in a tickertape rain.

Flying, in concept and in reality, is pretty much like this for me anyway—an extension of dreamtime. There is an expansion between my ears, not unlike helium but more sonorous, and deep tones are allowed entrance as a humming undercurrent that sustains the whole. Is this the cerulean siren song which called to Da Vinci? I admire his Icarus elegance, his locks flowing like Ganymede’s, the determination in his gaze, an angel’s ruth, even as the panic of plummeting starts. If there is a crowd watching, does not awe turn to terror and sorrow? Or is there only derision at the sight of feathers exploding like a plucked duster? (Actually if I were Leonardo’s maid, I too may be tempted to roll my eyes, thinking, Mama Mia, all those good goose-down pillows gone to waste.) Still, we have the meticulous drawings and notes in his journals to put a cork in more cynical speculations, and the fact that history proved his dreams right.

Not every human, let alone every artist, can say as much.

Lucky Leo. It wouldn’t take Freud to figure out what’s at the crux of this fantasy.

Oddly enough, while up in the air, I do not picture the mechanics of airplanes or copters at all, only the wonder of how something of substantial weight and mass can possibly defy gravity. To me it truly is a suspension of disbelief. The clouds become blueprints that slowly fill with sepia. I imagine newsreels of the Wright brothers’ trials and errors, the grainy footage of a regal Amelia Earhart and a gallant Charles Lindbergh waving to a sea of well-wishers. My own art, at one time, was obsessed with such a sense of the wondrous, the ideas of floating or falling, yet falling in such a way it was slow-mo and somewhat giddy. One of these mural-size works, “Go Ahead, Now You Try,” which eventually became a short film, was filled with these airy themes: wing-walkers, acrobats balancing on chairs, sky-divers riding parachute currents before a large sun-orange hot-air balloon, the balloon itself depicting two lovers.

Chagall understood such need to be apart from the heaviness of earth, the weariness of it, though I can also see the reason behind the thematic skies of a photographer like Robert ParkeHarrison. All is gray in his landscapes, his protagonist a tie-less man in black with a white shirt, an inventor of some sort creating machines that are a mixture of the organic (thistles and tumbleweeds) and the mechanical (wheels and propellers pulled from some endless scrap heap). The world he lives in appears post-apocalyptic, but there is something very humane in the narratives, for this inventor, whether on unicycle or radio towers, appears to be attempting flight, attempting to make progress out of chaos.

Lately my own flying dreams have taken on such dimensions. When younger and flying, always without the aid of machines, just using my arms, there was true ethereal glee, and landing woke me with a bounce. Some of those visions even included other mythic, prehistoric beasts, Loch Ness Monster-shaped, also taking to the skies. Now such dreams are rare, and should they occur, it is usually due to plight as opposed to flight, the need to escape something that is simultaneously cryptic, sinister, and yet mundane: the drear of office work perhaps, of shadow-stalked cubicles, or dim-lit grocery stores where zombie customers saunter with vacant hope of ever finding what they seek. I suspect such drear comes in part from middle age and knowing, as we all do when coming through schools of hard knocks, that certain aspirations are in a state of apparently permanent turbulence.

Still, “rows and flows of angel hair,” as Joni would sing, I do remember clouds with a vestige of childhood exhilaration. I remember riding in the backseat of my parents’ car, suddenly crying, “Bloop, bloop!” forgetting the word for blimp, and pointing at a distant cigar shape in the haze of the Catskills. I remember a flight to Paris by night, a large moon in my window and feeling like I was an astronaut orbiting that sphere through sketchy stretches of planetary mist. The world then felt made of glass. I recall my first airplane ride at age sixteen and rising above the farm I grew up on, thanks to a small private airport up the road. I recall passing over the same farm some twenty years later, on the lam from a bad relationship, but able to be aloft thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, a pilot, and actually being able to see my mother miles below, a recognizable dot on a riding mower as my brother-in-law swerved down for a closer look. Dad was down there too, no doubt instructing her on what blades of grass she missed. Yes, the world was and is a patchwork quilt, and knowledge of this still somehow impacts my art today.

Currently I am working on a mixed-media piece called “Temple of My Familiar,” part of a series begun in 2000 that explores world religions and cultures in search of commonality, as opposed to division. This piece has strips of felt in various shades of green layered with equally variegated planes of moss. Small cat and dog figures meander through it, among buildings and trees offering an invitation to get back to one’s roots. But are these roots of earth or air? Hovering, half-finished myself, I do not know, but can imagine seeing it as Snoopy would while riding his doghouse, wearing goggles and cape with pride. Putting my newer dreams of dread and waking up tired in their place, some part of me must be capable of saying yet, “Take that, Red Baron, you rascal you.”

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Mead