It’s summer and for some reason I’m in class. When I went to art school, our art classes were conducted in portables. The year after I left, the University had built a brand new building for its art students. This is not an instance of my SQ (Silas Quotient). I’ve visited that building, the new art building, and it’s just a little too solid, a little too precious. I preferred what I had got, the portables.

In my dream, it was summer, and I was in the portables and for some reason I was taking a summer course in photography. Or at least we had our photography teacher, Chuck. Chuck was an ex-hippie who had cleaned himself up. He still kept some of the vestiges of hippiedom. He still had his motorbike and he probably still sparked some of the time. Mainly he painted. He painted huge oil paintings of glass and greenery and rocks. They were macro oases. I never saw him paint anything else. And though he was our photography teacher, his own photography was, as far as I could tell, in service of these giant oases paintings.

The classroom was busy with hot sweaty students who didn’t really want to be there. I was uncomfortable and couldn’t sit still. Even though it was our photography teacher, we were instructed to draw a still life. But the room was set up wrong. I was at the end of a very long line of students and I couldn’t even see the still life. It took me about 30 minutes to get the attention of Chuck and I told him that I couldn’t see the still life. How could I possibly draw it? He told me to draw what I could see. I was irritated. I asked him to sit in my seat and take a look. He finally suffered himself to listen to me. He sat in my seat. Mostly what I could see was about ten heads bobbing in and out in front of the still life. I saw a bit of clay pot and then didn’t and then did. Presumably that’s what Chuck would see and wouldn’t see as well.

He asked everybody to stop when most of them had already got a good start. He explained it was because Silas couldn’t see; so now everyone was mad at me. And he moved everything around so I could see. I saw the clay pot clearly now, plus a couch, a fake door from a set, and wooden grillwork meant, I reckon, for vines to grown on. There were other indeterminable objects, too. It was a clumsy, disastrous, ill-lit still life now that I could see it and I was more uncomfortable and still I didn’t want to do it.

I don’t remember doing it, either. I remember dragging my pencil across the grey paper, altogether unsure where to pull out of the paper what I was so unhappily seeing. I suppose I never did decide because I don’t remember doing it.

In real life: I learned this past summer that Chuck, who I had always considered a sort of affable nemesis in my artistic catechism, had died a few years ago after a motorcycle accident.

Meanwhile, is there something I’m afraid to start? I mean besides Christmas shopping.

And what does this have to do with Christmas? About as much as rabbits to the Eucharist.

SS