"The fences of the light are down,
All but the briskest riders thrown,
And worlds hang on the trees."
—Dylan Thomas, "When once the twilight locks no longer"
Once when I was a young boy, my brother Terry came into the bedroom and found me sleeping. Later on he said that I’d been lying there with my eyes wide open. As a story it is a short one, but it has lingered in my imagination, turning from fact to metaphor and back again, becoming emblematic of a personal mythos. Dreaming with my eyes wide open: that is the main idea.
"A camera is a machine for dreaming."
—Jean Epstein, "L’intelligence d’une machine"
The dream of which I speak, which I imagine here before you, is a place we know well- an anyday kind of place, filled with an anyday kind of mystery. A silent spirit breathes with a quiet pulse, a heartbeat quivers the leaves in a tree and is echoed in the footprints on warm asphalt. Plunging into this elemental space and surfacing somewhere past immediate reality, this place is Here: to be lived in, breathed of, seen … and dreamed upon.
"I woke up on the roadside
Daydreamin’ about the way things sometimes are"
—Bob Dylan, "Idiot Wind"
This is a story: there are no words. This is a journey: there is no path. This a place: there is no time. Only you— and your eyes. The story is yours, mine, of you, for your eyes and mine. Find a still moment for this dreaming: with eyes wide open, the way is there. Then you will have words, there will be a direction and you will find time.
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ALL PHOTOGRAPHS made 1982-85 in Madison, Wisconsin and environs (Dane County), © 1986, Lewis Koch