Adam Blatner

That’s how my pal Russ Williams addressed me. Yes, I replied, “Ptat”, an acronym that’s sort of spat out, related phonemically to the Al Capp (cartoonist of Li’l Abner) p’tooey. So this essayette focused on the object of the sentence: All Thoughts. Now here we have a category that is not only vast, but fuzzy at the edge.

I have thoughts that are not yet formed—fuzzy-edged. They probably will come to be better formed in time, but the category—the fuzzy-edged-thought, or FuZEDGTh’   represents, on close inspection, only 1/10th of all thoughts, but on closer inspection, 94% of all thoughts, because this fuzzy-edged region expands into thinnner and thinner regions, more and more subconscious. You see, it’s a spectrum of consciousness, from explicit, yes, I know that thought and can discuss it articulately, to those that must be discussed more poetically, to half-formed, grunted, to pre-verbal, painted or danced but no word come, to pre-expressive… and so forth. Like the atmosphere of our holy planet that just gets thinner and thinner.

It’s not as if there are discrete compartments—conscious, sub- and un- ! And it is these gradations I note. Spinning off, I’ve noted that many feelings, memory traces, and the like have nodes that go off in yet other directions. I had a dream a couple of days ago, of riding a taxi-bus-trolly over a many-stories high arching railroad kind of thing over mid-San Francisco, and could see vaguely our going down over downtown. I (we) were over mid-town from this vantage point and I could see the lovely profile of tall buildings (a number taller than our train) south of us, while south-west there was a morning sun. (Of course the Sun is only to the southwest in the afternoon but in dream-worlds that consideration doesn’t count.) But that wasn’t the astonishing part.

The astonishing part was that I could vaguely see or get the impression of a number of related dream scenes that I had dreamed over the last score years, and they were there, sort of. The tunnels to the East Bay—and there were (and still are right now) hints of these memories, and the ships on the bay and several dreams alluding to these—different scenes— and travels on the ground among the San Francisco-ish dream streets, and travels on the freeways to the south.

This vision, sort-of, was a "node" somehow, a point of intersection of whole story-dream-scenes. And it was my dream-manager’s way of saying to me that I had little idea of the grand realm of dreams and its geography. This in turn was a symbolic way of hinting that: (1) saying it was all located IN the intracranial meat of my brain was like saying that all the movies that are shown in the movie houses are located in the projector… it just didn’t figure! And (2) But what was that wider source for the movies and much else? Hint: There are nodes of associations! What? Explain!

Alas, puny-human-brains (a phrase I’ve begun to use) can in no way comprehend any kind of explanation. It would be like trying to get monkeys to understand algebra and geometry. Singed— well, no, I should right signed, but singed is also true, my poor mind is singed by the full brightness of the press of the Great Mind on my puny-human-brain…  with Freudian Slips abounding    braing   the orgain that braings the diffuse wholeness of the cosmos into a focus? No it doesn’t, it braings one grain of sand that makes up the mountain. Ptat Adam