Sleep turns every one of us, even the most prosaic, into an absurdist. Imagine: Oliver Cromwell, Queen Victoria, Vladimir Lenin, Leona Helmsley, Lawrence Welk and Richard Nixon all had surrealistic fantasies once they lay their heads upon their pillows.
Sleep is hard to envision…dreams are easy, but sleep evanesces. It spins the color wheel and stops between crimson-black and purple. Shapes beckon silently with limbs made of night clouds. The mind slips its moorings and floats out on the ebbing tide. Sleep stretches the canvas for our dreams to paint pictures that are always in motion, like this one by Mark Rothko.
Green Over Blue oil on canvas, 1956. Click on the picture for a closer look.
4 comments:
"Sleep stretches the canvas for our dreams to paint pictures that are always in motion..".
I like that. Beautifully put. Dreams seldom visit me in my sleep. I just sleep. A profound sleep.
Beautifully said! The Rothko painting fits the prose perfectly. It is one of his later works, yes? Did you know a similar painting of his sold last June at Christie's for almost $5 million? (Makes me want to rethink my career. :) )
He worked for more than a decade after this, his paintings getting darker as his health and personal life deteriorated.
Rothko is my absolute favorite painter. And I covet a good night's sleep, deep and uninterrupted, which I haven't had in so long I can no longer remember. I cover the sleep of the little girl at the nail salon, dead to the world amidst the chatter, her head cocked seemingly uncomfortably, one leg up on the chair.
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