Dreaming of Eigenvectors

I’ve been asleep for 2 days with the flu gratis my teenager who stayed out too late Saturday night.

My special screenplay “advisor” told me my dream sequences are unrealistic: no one dreams about history and math. My new Canadian “friend” told me she’d teach me how to dream.

Now, after the acupuncturist and podiatrist both took their best stabs at fixing my foot (literally), I can’t go back to sleep (I promise to write soon about my right foot).

I’ve decided that I won’t find the right job until I can bring humor and romance back into my life.  

My life seems like such a dream, unrealistic in almost every way. My mother just emailed me asking if I took her to hear Ornette Coleman at the Palace Theatre in London when I studied there in 1980. She stuffed kleenex in her ears; I can still feel the percussion in my bones. I just love that she remembers that, and hope it’s a memory of “Type 2” fun (i.e., in retrospect, rather than real-time), and not torture. I remember the seats were blue, but maybe it was just the music.

That whole year was like a dream. I visited Eastern Europe before the Wall fell, as well as Morocco and much of England and Western Europe, using a student Eurail pass to sleep on trains and wake in a different country and city eight hours away. Sometimes, I ended up sleeping in a train station or behind bushes in a park, curled up in the revolving door of a commercial high-rise or on the dirt-floor of a home in a slum outside of Casa Blanca. (Don’t tell Mom!) I wore a bright green blazer with gold buttons and carried a backpack full of books I never read. I’ll never forget the supernatural feeling of leaping around the fells in the Lake District barefoot and covered in mud. All like a dream. 

After a cold-water flat or two, I lived with the Secretary to the President of the Polish Government in Exile, and visited the Gdansk shipyards just as Solidarnosc began to change the course of history. For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote a comparative biography of Lech Walensa and Mikhail P. Tomsky. After graduating, I moved to NYC and for several years shared a sixth-floor walkup with a Polish peasant in the East Village. He spoke no English and wore long johns to bathe in the tub in our kitchen. His feet smelled so much like the raw garlic he would eat to ward off whatever ailed him that I had to time my meals long before or after he took a bath. We communicated via shots of vodka on Friday nights. Despite rubbing Epson Salts on his sore muscles every day, I heard Danek died as soon as he returned to the old country. I just looked up his Polish name; it's origin is Hebrew, Daniel, about whom I wrote last week, and means "God is my Judge."

A few years later, while the Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik stayed with me, we watched (he filmed) from my window as thieves stripped his cousin's parked car like ants leaving only the apple’s core, after it had been hit in a drive by. The front-page photo of the military tank during the East Village squatter riots took place on the same spot, right in front of my building. I learned from Tompkins Park that a “revolution” can occur without anyone hearing just blocks away, and remembered from a college professor that poverty is the best preserver of history. The squatters are long gone and that block is now full of high-end cafés and tourists; I've made and lost my first million, and we continue to forget and to dream.

The most heroic act of the protagonist in my screenplay is to sell solar power to the nuclear industry to stave off disaster in 2027. I’m going to apply for a job to direct the solar strategy of the biggest nuclear power company in New Jersey. I’d be great at that job, but will never get it. Barry Commoner’s obituary was on the front page of New York Times this week, just before I fell asleep. He was one of the founders of the environmental movement in the U.S., ran for president and was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970. The day before he died, while visiting studios in DUMBO, a friend of mine and I talked about our work with him years ago on a Brooklyn advisory panel. In the early 90s, Commoner asked me to be his successor, but withdrew the offer when I asked him when he planned to retire.

I am the most amazing job interviewer. More on that too in future blogs.

I received a letter from Al Gore praising one of my books that was reviewed side-by-side his in USA Today. I lost the letter. At least I got the VP to sign his book for me. And, somewhere, he has a signed copy of mine! Did I tell you about when Andy Warhol tried to pick me up on Second Avenue, and I brushed him off, mop head and all? Or when Allen Ginsburg corrected my English when I told him I lived on the top of the Palisade, just months before he died and while he was signing every scrap of paper in sight, like printing currency for his family?

There was a programmer who worked with me in the early 80s, who I joked once, “couldn’t figure out which disk drive to stick it in.” He finally found a girlfriend, and then was murdered on a NY subway before Bernie Goetz took revenge. A friend-of-a-friend became front-page news when he disappeared after leaving the late-night party on Canal Street where I had been hanging with him. Or how about the time that my grandmother insulted Tony Randall for smoking while we were eating at Sardi’s, or when Joe Moakley told me he worked for Congress after he asked me what I was did for a living. I watched Mike Wallace rip out newspaper articles while barking at an assistant, and John Kenneth Galbraith buried thick in a book as if he were on the plane all alone.

I got a full scholarship to study with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief even though I could never understand what an eigenvalue is. I still wake up thinking my degrees are just a dream, and that I only really know what I learned today.

And just like a dream, that ain't the half of it....