archiving the city

In dreams, affects take shape and form and color. affects are drawn into resonance, the seemingly disparate in waking life are crashed or woven together into intricate, shocking, garish, intimate realness.

A key character in dreams, or narratives of dreams, is the setting itself. In my dreams, interior and exteriors blend, neighborhoods in different cities open up to each other, like the impossible geographies of Kafka’s stories.

(film credit: “N.Y., N.Y.” Francis Thompson, dir. 1959)

Yesterday the New York Times published an Iraq war veteran’s dreams and reflections. Here are some important excerpts:

What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.

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