Dreamtigers

Nature study

A squirrel.. you have to be really gentle, because they are really nervous. Eating in one of the branches looking aroung, while I, behind the window take a picture of her, the tree and the really green yard in this first days of spring.

Some poems by Angel González, the translation its mine.

Days and days of dirty snow that doesn't quite melt. Cold days with too many cars, too many mud, to many wet socks. Finally a heavy storm transform all the landscape in a white sheet. We don't need to leave the house, only for today we can stay in and enjoy the blinding white from the window.

She looks at me from the window. A stone cold beauty. She still remembers the last carnival, the last time somebody invited to her to dance. Is hard to tell, if she is sad or may be if she is just remembering the dance steps she made, the hand that took here waist, the kiss that somebody stole from her in the last hour of the night. I want to open the window and steel a kiss from here and may be the beads. Or may be I just want to dance with her, perhaps the next carnival I'll be here again and we can dance together.

I like old movie theaters. Closed who knows how much time ago, all the letters and lights in the sign are already lost or broke, all the kids that one day gather below that sign, probably are living far away and perhaps had already forgotten those days. Now is a dead building, the smoke little by little make the sign and walls darker. I almost can visualize the inside of this old theater, chairs like rotten corpses, a dirty screen, one day perfectly white. Dust all around and an old machine blind for ever looking throw that little window to the empty room. If you hear carefully you can hear an old machinery working, and if you look carefully you can se a ghostly light beam crossing the room, making appear the dust particles, and playing one more time that movie you already remember.

I began using bricks to build stuff. Then I use smaller ones. And now to build stuff, I use the smallest ones of all: words.

There are always something interesting about a sobreexposed picture. A picture of somebody or something that now is forgotten by the picture. A mystery, a question, an unsolved puzzle. A blank picture is really similar like this leaves, they were someday part of something, but now yellow, wrinkled and wet just wait the garbage truck.

Colors, reds and greens. The first one changes and mutates, the second one last all the year sorrounding the other colors.

Freud explains that the "uncanny" is in reality "nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old - established in the mind that's has been estranged only by the process of repression" (Rivkin p. 427) . Because of this definition, we understand that everything that creates an "uncanny" feeling has to be inside of us, repressed but still present. If this is true, how can a writer or director generate the feeling of uncanniness in the audience without knowing everything that lies inside them? Is either the ability of the creator that lets him guess and pull out the repressed feelings, or there is something else?.

Let's examine a regular horror movie. In a certain moment the victim approaches a closed door. We, the audience, don't know what is on the other side of the door, nor the victim. Why does a closed door scare us and make us feel the "uncanny" feeling? Maybe the music is helping, the angle of the camera, the lights, the speed of the movements; we can feel in the air that something is going to happen. And in a lot of movies, it does, the killer (zombie, dead man, wild dog, alien, crazy wife, somber blond child) opens the door and the victim screams and runs away. We wait for this moment; we pay for this split-second of horror and the moments before when the music and tension is almost unbearable. Some good directors let the victim open the door and continue the search, maintaining the tension or breaking it anticlimactically

That is a common example of how the director can use that which we have inside us, like the fear of the unknown or the dark, but transform it into a feeling that could be easily turned on and off using simple tricks. I know this example is not about the "uncanny" but about the "fear". But because this two concepts lie together it can help to illustrate my point.

Baudrillard talks about the progression of the image from the reality to its mere simulacrum. The horror movies and books constantly embody that definition. First The fear of the unknown, the darkness or the pain is a reflection of a basic reality, (which lies down inside us, in our subconscious). Second The fear of a killer hidden in the darkness is a perversion of a basic reality. We have the fear, but we move the fear from the unknown and the night to the killer itself. Third The closed door is the absence of a basic reality. Nothing tells us that there is a killer ready to cut our insides out, but the construction around the fear - the music, the angle of the camera, the lights and the movements - generate the same fear effect. Fourth But we are talking about a movie where there is not possibility of real danger, it's only a fictional experience, but we, in the theater, eating popcorns and sipping cola, can feel a real sensation of fear.

How can this example can help us with the "uncanniness" talked about by Freud; this "something (that) ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light". (Rivkin p. 427). Baudrillard talks about the simulation as "the generations of models of a real without origin or reality" (Baudrillard) . Today, as in the example of the simulacrum of fear, we lived in a moment when the uncanniness can be generated, not only in the experiments of creating deja-vu or inducing new memories in therapy patients, but in the creations of the same sensations in literature, movies, art, etc. The capacity to create the "uncanny" in most of the audience could be not only explained with a common repressed feeling, but rather with the creation of a simulacrum of a repressed feeling. So, as Baudrillard says, "the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models [this common repressed feelings] and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times".

The good artists can create uncanniness because they known their own repressed feelings and can model and create a construction (like the music) that emulates the real thing by forming a simulacrum.

I was speaking and living in English for the last few days. I maybe improve a little my speaking but I'm still far for feeling comfortable with the language.

The university I arrived, the Ohio State University, is big, really big, only to say that it has a airport of its own, not a small airport for jets, a real one where the students of aeronautics can learn to fly real planes. The university has his own bus service, as well a football stadium and very large buildings. They love to talk about how big this university is (second bigger after Texas'), and they to love to talk about it football team. I never saw a complete match of this sport, but I'm sure I'll have the opportunity;. I had it with soccer too, and it was enough, although I never read nothing interesting, literary speaking, about football, and a lot of literature have been written about soccer.

This days the university is kind of empty, they told us that the reason is the classes hasn't began until end of September, and then we will see a lot of people and a lot of stress in the area.

One of the most interesting thing, language related, in the department I'm in, the Spanish and Portuguese Department, is that all the people, but the secretaries, speak a very fluent Spanish and English, in a way the feeling of bilingualism is really strong. The Latin-American students are a few (only a third part), but the rest of the American students have been speaking Spanish for many years so the first language in class is the English but everybody understands well the Spanish as well. The feeling of mixed languages, cross-languages conversations and a free choice of words, in either Spanish or English, is really similar to what I experienced in a full bilingual culture like Barcelona. I think the conversation is richer if the people can find in their background the best word to use in any given situation. The important things is to communicate ideas, and with more languages you have more tools to do it.

He always have had beutiful dreams. All the people he know always told him that. But he lived in a little and grey valley and the dreams the people knew, were also little and grey. So he decided to leave his house and travel towards the big city. In the trip he talk with people and told them about his dreams, all the people he knew in the road, also told him that his dreams were the most exiting things they ever have heard. When he arrived to the city he was convinced that his dreams could bring him to the fame. He began to think how to show his dremas, because the stories he told weren’t even a small portion of his dreams. He began to work in a little warehouse where he learned how to fix bicycles and watches. He studied a long time this mechanisms, and finally arrived to a conclusion. If he could build a machine to show the people his dreams he could make a fortune in tickets. So, he began to work, assembling parts, watching he rotations of a thousands wheels, measuring carefully the lengths and rhythms of clocks and pendulous. Finally he finished to build the dream-machine: a big mechanism which could connect the Dream Maker with a small public.

In a few weeks the Dream Machine was a complete success. People form all around he country came to dream his dreams. Everybody came surprised and very happy after every show. The Dream Maker only had to sleep in the center of the machine, and the people, after the payment of a small fee, could feel the same he was dreaming. He was becoming rich and famous.

Until one day. A woman in the audience began to dream too. And the Dream Maker sensed it. It was a beautiful dream, better than anything he could make. He fell in love of the woman, and of the woman’s dreams. But when the Dreamer awake, the woman have already gone. He never could find her again.

The beautiful woman’s dreams that he had felt, began to torture his owns. He never could dream something like that. And form this day, the Dreamer began to have nightmares. But the public doesn’t complain. The people love to be afraid when they aren’t in danger, or when this aren’t their dreams. So more people began to came, even form other countries. The nightmares the dreamer had every day and every night, became a real national sensation. But he couldn’t resist anymore. Every time he woke up, he was trembling and cover in sweat. So he decided to stop dreaming. He began to take sleeping pills, and the nightmares disappeared, but also the dreams. Every night he could only dream clouds and fogs, gray smoke and freezing hazes. The people stop coming, stop paying for the dreams, and the machine began to rust and in a few months began to fall in pieces.

The Dreamer never dream again, even after stop taking sleeping pills. He returned to his town and now he lives and works there. Now and then he dreams a little, some lights and colors and a face of a woman. But he never told this dream to anybody.

In a few days I will be heading to USA to study literature, and Dreamitigers is the blog that will come with me all the way. I'll maintain in Spanish El Forastero without changes, but I want to begin to write in English too. I don't have much practice or abilities in this new language, but one of my objectives in this trip is to learn how to write decently so I've begun this new blog. It won't be a translated copy of El Forastero nor a popular blog wannabe, it's planed to work (by now) only like an English exercise, and a chronic of this country from its own language.