Tamarika: I dream of Dali

This morning when I awoke, I lay quietly staring at the ceiling. My mind was whirling from dreams I had been dreaming it seemed all night long. Passionate, intense colors and shapes, sensual and frustrating, frightening and intriguing. Dali had come inside my head and awakened, aroused pieces of thoughts and feelings from who knows where. I wish I could tell you about my dreams, the parts I remember and which are still so close to me right now as I write. I am able to sense, hear, see, smell, taste, and almost touch the people, movements and atmosphere that haunt and reach into my brain. But it is intimate and personal and only a little known to me at this moment.

What I do remember, vividly, is sitting on my bedroom floor playing with little dolls. I must have been ten, eleven, even twelve. These were not new, shiny beautiful dolls like "Barbie" or baby dolls complete with lace and ribbons and such. They were strange little old broken creatures, some with a leg or arm missing and one with a hollow hole where the eye had once been. I collected them wherever I found them, lying in a lane or thrown out by a friend. My aunt had made two of my collection out of pipe cleaners, sewn their clothes from pieces of felt, and crudely spun the hair from silk worms she cultivated at home. My grandmother gave the pipe cleaner dolls to me because I loved to play with them when I visited her as a child.

All the dolls lived in an old shoe-box, which was housed on one of the bookshelves in my room. Whenever the world, school, and especially goings-on in my family became too much for me to bear I would close myself up in my room, take out the box of dolls and proceed to act out scenarios Cinderella-like in nature. The girl doll was always a heroine, plain and saintly who nobody had discovered yet. In the end the male doll would realize her worth and rescue or fall in love with her, showing her to be the beauty and intelligent person who no one had acknowledged or noticed before. Often there was a villain, usually another girl or wicked woman who tried to shame and humiliate her, competing for the boy doll's favors. I remember the male character with great detail. He had dark pink coloring and stood sturdy, stocky and naked. No genitalia of course. His body was made of hard plastic so that arms, hands, legs, even head could not turn or bend except side to side or up and down. When he sat down his legs stuck out straight ahead. He was rigid and stiff. The female heroine figurine was one of the pipe cleaner dolls. Her silky hair was long and golden. Her body as flexible as could be.

For literally hours at a time I would sit on the floor, whispering voices impersonating the dolls and playing out their life stories over and over again. Totally enraptured, encaptured by their lives I would forget my own, and sink into a dream-state of imaginary and fantasy play. Sometimes Nanny Margaret would bring my meal up to my room because I had forgotten to go downstairs to join the others, so lost in the play was I.

For years I played my life out like those dolls feeling victimized, marginalized, invisible, waiting for some one to come and, discover, acknowledge and rescue me from my shadow. Dali awakened my old, painful memories with his contorted, paranoid, hysterical, intense, passionate images and colors, shadows and bright, golden light. I stood in the different exhibit halls surrounded by images of love, hate, rage, fear, anxiety and towards the end, brilliance and revelation, and was overcome with it all. Exhausted, I drove home in silence and crawled back into the cave of my self only to fall into a dream-filled sleep.

This morning, memories of dolls and confronting the pain of my old psyche, drew me into my study and back to my blog. A kind of relief settled inside me with that old familiar feeling of closing myself up, safely, in my room alone for hours. A different venue to play out my life story. A stronger me. No longer do I feel invisible or victimized. Nor do I feel the need for a savior to rescue me from myself. I think of one of Dali's paintings where his wife, Gala, is holding a butterfly in one hand and an hourglass in another portraying freedom as fleeting.

For some reason this morning, too, I remember three years ago a friend of mine wrote to me after we had successfully coordinated a large conference together: