Annotation of a Dream
Draft 1
06 May 2023
Animal J. Smith
“The poems of the project are attempts at writing into the gaps of dreams and what might have been.”
—Chris Gylee, performance artist, poet, lyricist, co-principal of ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, an audience-facing collaborative art practice based in Berlin, Hauptstadt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and author of 1997: Dream of Animal J. Smith, from the online-homed project FORTY, published to the open Web August 2022, and the source for the generation of the following rhetorical document.
ANNOTATION OF A DREAM/EXPLICATION OF A DREAM
Creative Response Within Formal Rhetorical Framewor for Written Art/Literary Product Derived from Primary Source as Fundament
Gylee’s lyrical stanzas referenced above:
Emerging as an expression impressed on electronic apparition
conveyed to the viewer/reader, emerging with characteristics
typified by first-level irregular scansion and schema
rounding into anapestic quadrameter (formal rhythmic feet and meter)
One work, free-standing, contextual inferred implication
Generated through first expressor’s encounter with journalized press release
Preserved as artifact, housed in the collections of the
Schwules Museum, Berlin.
Animal disappeared completely.
He moved to New York and got covered in dust
And the world went sideways
I slept the sleep of Rip van Winkle
That scion of Upstate where the headless horseman roamed
Looking for an honest man, holding a light against the night
A flute unplayable, then lost,
The muse doubly rebuffed
And the riches swiped like a MetroCard
Archives gone the way of Alexandria
The lighthouse Fresnel dimmed
Silent and useless against the relentless fog
Overrun by tendrils of automation
Kelp becoming kudzu, invasive and lurking
Just under the surface of consciousness
I am alive, I screamed
Two decades howling from under the mud
Pockets of salvation, bubbles in the odd airlock
That would cross my stumbling path
As I dreamed of redemption and return
Recalled to life, the tale of one city
I, Sydney Carton, Dickensian double,
Lacking the name that was once all my own
Generic in form, unremarkable concept,
Could have been anyone else anywhere,
Any time but this one, eternally out of joint
Lost by the wind grieved, I can’t go home again,
My home wiped from Earth’s face, that grundstück reclaimed
By a new generation, suddenly, and now,
The place I knew wiped out, the records destroyed
Now in the lungs and the cells of my neighbors
Colleagues and friends, fuck buddies and lovers
Slumped in the bar car, the Metro North train
First stop in Stamford, pissing out the Stoli
Along with the atoms of my life’s work and hope
There lies the record, the shared DNA
In the creamy and chewy remains of the many
Forever unfound by the snouts of the canines
Good boys and girls all with powerful noses
Finding the fragments of fathers and lovers
Spread on the roofs of the offices, shuttered,
Abandoned that day with the calendar pages
Frozen in place, all pages unturned
Mold in the coffee cups, strange new bacteria
Scientists told us the buildings left empty
For years past the blast were now incubating
Life forms unknown and new. Hardly a blessing
To us and to me. We’d already been poisoned. Our eyes long since melted,
Images burned in our eyeballs forever
Warping our vision with horror. Unthinkable -
Now our dark treasure. With whom could I share it,
Who’d not be destroyed by recounting the sight
And the smell. God, the smell. Astringent and bitter
And strangely organic. The taste in my mouth
Walking from my ruined home to the subway
Chewing the air as I walked along Fulton Street
Up to the 2 train, choking and hacking up
All of the wormwood remains of that day
Filling my vision, corrupting my head,
Knowing the answer so soon to the query:
Where did they all go? The diligent doggies
Missed all the molecules too small to be sniffed out
Filtered through noses of we who survived
The lost and unfound had now found their new dwelling
Inside of our bronchial tubes. In that sense,
They are alive. And I carry their spirits
Ambitions and dreams, even now. That absorption
Knocked me out cold. It took a few years
Just to remember the name I once had,
Lives and identities, halfway recalled,
Incomplete, raw and unrealized. Still,
Dreaming of Animal once rendered hopeless,
Recalled to life, but for what? Years were stolen,
Abuse on abuse, wandering, broken apart,
Muses dispatched, and the visions of fire
Usurping the living and squandering time,
Twenty-one years gone. A third of my life
Stolen from me. I did not ask for this.
You’d have to ask some raw psychic, some dubious
Charlatan
[endpoint of Annotation of a Dream – Draft 1, in progress]
[Animal J. Smith, May 6, 2023, San Francisco, CA]
[Shared from OneDrive by link via Instagram to Chris Gylee of Once We Were Islands]
—Chris Gylee, performance artist, poet, lyricist, co-principal of ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS, an audience-facing collaborative art practice based in Berlin, Hauptstadt der Bundesrepublik Deutschland and author of 1997: Dream of Animal J. Smith, from the online-homed project FORTY, published to the open Web August 2022, and the source for the generation of the following rhetorical document.
ANNOTATION OF A DREAM/EXPLICATION OF A DREAM
Creative Response Within Formal Rhetorical Framewor for Written Art/Literary Product Derived from Primary Source as Fundament
Gylee’s lyrical stanzas referenced above:
Emerging as an expression impressed on electronic apparition
conveyed to the viewer/reader, emerging with characteristics
typified by first-level irregular scansion and schema
rounding into anapestic quadrameter (formal rhythmic feet and meter)
One work, free-standing, contextual inferred implication
Generated through first expressor’s encounter with journalized press release
Preserved as artifact, housed in the collections of the
Schwules Museum, Berlin.
Animal disappeared completely.
He moved to New York and got covered in dust
And the world went sideways
I slept the sleep of Rip van Winkle
That scion of Upstate where the headless horseman roamed
Looking for an honest man, holding a light against the night
A flute unplayable, then lost,
The muse doubly rebuffed
And the riches swiped like a MetroCard
Archives gone the way of Alexandria
The lighthouse Fresnel dimmed
Silent and useless against the relentless fog
Overrun by tendrils of automation
Kelp becoming kudzu, invasive and lurking
Just under the surface of consciousness
I am alive, I screamed
Two decades howling from under the mud
Pockets of salvation, bubbles in the odd airlock
That would cross my stumbling path
As I dreamed of redemption and return
Recalled to life, the tale of one city
I, Sydney Carton, Dickensian double,
Lacking the name that was once all my own
Generic in form, unremarkable concept,
Could have been anyone else anywhere,
Any time but this one, eternally out of joint
Lost by the wind grieved, I can’t go home again,
My home wiped from Earth’s face, that grundstück reclaimed
By a new generation, suddenly, and now,
The place I knew wiped out, the records destroyed
Now in the lungs and the cells of my neighbors
Colleagues and friends, fuck buddies and lovers
Slumped in the bar car, the Metro North train
First stop in Stamford, pissing out the Stoli
Along with the atoms of my life’s work and hope
There lies the record, the shared DNA
In the creamy and chewy remains of the many
Forever unfound by the snouts of the canines
Good boys and girls all with powerful noses
Finding the fragments of fathers and lovers
Spread on the roofs of the offices, shuttered,
Abandoned that day with the calendar pages
Frozen in place, all pages unturned
Mold in the coffee cups, strange new bacteria
Scientists told us the buildings left empty
For years past the blast were now incubating
Life forms unknown and new. Hardly a blessing
To us and to me. We’d already been poisoned. Our eyes long since melted,
Images burned in our eyeballs forever
Warping our vision with horror. Unthinkable -
Now our dark treasure. With whom could I share it,
Who’d not be destroyed by recounting the sight
And the smell. God, the smell. Astringent and bitter
And strangely organic. The taste in my mouth
Walking from my ruined home to the subway
Chewing the air as I walked along Fulton Street
Up to the 2 train, choking and hacking up
All of the wormwood remains of that day
Filling my vision, corrupting my head,
Knowing the answer so soon to the query:
Where did they all go? The diligent doggies
Missed all the molecules too small to be sniffed out
Filtered through noses of we who survived
The lost and unfound had now found their new dwelling
Inside of our bronchial tubes. In that sense,
They are alive. And I carry their spirits
Ambitions and dreams, even now. That absorption
Knocked me out cold. It took a few years
Just to remember the name I once had,
Lives and identities, halfway recalled,
Incomplete, raw and unrealized. Still,
Dreaming of Animal once rendered hopeless,
Recalled to life, but for what? Years were stolen,
Abuse on abuse, wandering, broken apart,
Muses dispatched, and the visions of fire
Usurping the living and squandering time,
Twenty-one years gone. A third of my life
Stolen from me. I did not ask for this.
You’d have to ask some raw psychic, some dubious
Charlatan
[endpoint of Annotation of a Dream – Draft 1, in progress]
[Animal J. Smith, May 6, 2023, San Francisco, CA]
[Shared from OneDrive by link via Instagram to Chris Gylee of Once We Were Islands]