Customer Reviews

Joseph Cornell's Dreams

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In general I feel about dream journals rather the way that Edmund Wilson did about Agatha Christie, for what is more boring than reading the dreams of another? Even one's own dreams are notable only for their evanescence and mind-boggling vapidity--and they're long, like life. Therefore I turned to this volume with trepidation, but as it happens it's become one of my favorite little books.

It's not as though the boxkunstler Joseph Cornell decided to pen a dream journal. Instead it fell to editor Catherine Corman to come up with the sharp idea of mining Cornell's voluminous diaries, and finding the parts where he describes his dreams--and perhaps the most telling ones, for this is a "selected" book on two counts. Corman has a winning, sincere way of expressing her thoughts on Cornell; she is not as ambitious as Deborah Solomon, who wrote the much-praised biography UTOPIA PARKWAY, or "How I Proved That Cornell Might Have Been Heterosexually Inclined," and yet Corman has a few gaucheries of her own, like that guide to the themes of Cornell's dreams that serves as an afterword, filled with such crushingly banal wisdom as "Water inspires images of sinking and floating." Well really, what else is there? But even this catalogue has its own virtues, for Corman is unexpectedly poetic and terse, and something of Cornell's own eccentricity seems to have rubbed off on her like wet gilt. The book itself is lovely as only the people at Exact Change know how, though I might have skipped the idea to print every word of the text in the indigo Linda Darnell wore playing the Virgin Mary in THE SONG OF BERNADETTE. What's nice on a star sometimes proves hard to read on slick white paper.

Cornell's assistants used to speak of witnessing him waking from a nap and rising from his day bed, eyes still closed, hands reaching out like the zombies of the living dead, towards his works in progress, new inspiration from his dreams focussing his unconscious energies. The diary entries seem sometimes rushed as though he were hurrying to write it all down before he forgot--nouns and adjectives speed-jotted into abbreviations ("presum." for "presumable," "y'day" for "yesterday," "bks" for "books"). One doesn't often get a glimpse of Cornell at top speed, for his projects always seem so considered, meditative. It's rather thrilling to see him up and down on a roller coaster ride.