in the dream

in the dream

i am visiting a museum of obscure poetic works which has taken over the famed winchester mystery house in san jose, california. i don't remember too much of what i viewed but a few things stuck out. one was a rambling japanese concrete poem which was made out of customized engraved and painted dominoes. as the dominoes fell, speakers intoned the characters along with the action (at least this is what we were being told). apparently the poem could also self-reset and also existed in its own sealed meandering chamber which randomly pierced walls and floors in the spirit of the original winchester house. another detail is that by (i guess) 'using magnets', sometimes the dominoes would be falling along the ceiling of their chamber instead of the floor.

the other part of the tour i remember pretty well, is finding (at random it seemed) a more secret part of the museum, or rather harder to get at.. i had to slip between two unmarked bookcases which of course were lined with books.. I remember seeing a whole set of maybe six hand-tooled green leather volumes that only had the word 'mud' (I,II,II,...) written in gold on the spines.. on the other side was a kind of great wooden visitors desk with an older couple attending, a man with a long white beard, and a young woman with a long white beard. the man wore a bright all red suit, like santa claus, and the woman wore an odd garment which appeared to be a single silken cord which wrapped and rewrapped around all the parts of her body. the main attraction of this 'secret area' apparently was a movie that was showing, and a group of photographs and a book display on the life of béla arisztid vojnich who according to the tour operators was a 2nd cousin to bela lugosi, well known in his time for his "spirtualist cinema writing" and his miraculous film, a gondolkodó füst. the strange part about the whole situation was that the spirit of mr. vojnich was supposedly in attendance, and it had to approve all entrants into the theater. there was a small shrine set up, in which a lovely and large bronze bust of the gentleman existed smoking a large calabash pipe. the shrine itself was nothing more than a heavy velvet cinema curtain drawn in a circle around the bust, but the pipe was smoking furiously, and as you watched it more and more, the bust looked much more real. at some point i felt like i had been having a conversation with the old man for some time, there was evidently some odd time contraction or etiolation, a smoky hand puffed freshly from the pipe led the way into the dim velvety interior, i followed obediently, and sat down to watch

a gondolkodo füst

which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment in one sense as i could not read the language at all, but the film was exquisitely beautiful. smoke would flow into words and then some of the words (or even letters) would change or leave or other words would be added; it was really something to watch. and the font somehow took into account the reality of the physics of smoke until you got the impression that the letters in this film may have been as large as 6 feet across each, each letter a filmed process in itself, montaged together into words, though sometimes the words seemed to form by themselves as a single process.. it was a very engrossing effect.

at the end as i left not just the theater but the whole museum
i found that i was not in san jose at all, but something which looked to my eye just like victoria falls

victoria falls as seen from the winchester mystery house


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