3.15.06
10:10 PM
I just finished The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Excellent book. It’s about sleep, dreaming and the thinness of reality. I feel a bit beat since I’ve been swimming and all that so my mind isn’t really up to a comprehensive review, but I highly recommend it. Very interesting stuff. It also has one of the most beautiful passages in it. It’s from Victor Hugo’s Travailleurs de la Mer (Workers of the Sea). Since I have nothing but time and burning eyes on my hands, I will share it with you.

“Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, boarders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there’s a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense. Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature.…Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe….The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss…and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night.”

About six months before it was finished (mid to late 2005), Trent Reznor had planned to call his new album “bleed through” and it was to deal with certain aspects of one reality “bleeding through” into others and it was to capture that concept in its sound. He threw out the idea in favor of a “drug recovery” album, but he kept a lot of the “reality is not real” stuff. On the website around the time “With Teeth” (the new album’s eventual title) was still “bleed through” the official Nine Inch Nails web site had quotes and bits and pieces from The Lathe of Heaven scattered around it. After reading this book, there’s this whole new depth to the NIN album but I still want to ask Reznor what the connection (if any) there actually is between the book and the album.
Speaking of which, NIN s playing at Jones Beach Saturday, June 17th (or whatever Saturday that is) and since Christina can’t go (Woman’s Group thing) I will have an extra ticket. Mind you, this is not merely a ticket to a Nine Inch Nails show, this is a ticket to the sound check (Nine Inch Nails plays three or four songs for an audience of fifty or so) and band meet and greet (go on, tell Trent you think he looks like Trevor) plus early admission to the venue. I plan to take my place at the very back of the pit (no hustle, no bustle and the PERFECT view of the whole show) so anyone interested, let me know. I think it’s like $65 or so. Honestly, I think Ray and Dorothy might be the only people interested in going, but I’m letting it swing up here in case anyone is interested.
My relief is here. Time to fizz…….