Not sure about "They fle from me," Andrew. Isn't it a tart
representation of the Whiner's (victim's) discourse? Well, scratch
"tart" (just woke up to its meaning). Asserting and acknowledging
then disclaiming the privilege of daunger? And at the same time,
using dreamlike passivity to get off the hook. And vengefully
reasserting daunger at the end. Tottel's version of the last line,
"What think you by this that she hath deserved?," conveys a more
pungent sense of his "gentilnes," his cortezza, than the more
anthologized alternative because the second-person interrogatory
turns gentle prey into publisher and plaintiff into prosecutor. It
brings Reader into court as judge and jury
Admittedly, "she" all but hums "dream a little dream of me." It was
dreamlike but no dream. He found this guy and his oneiric
appurtenances in Ovid-places.
Then later in the century, along came Acrasia.
But I'm only lingering at dawn, just saying this.
>>Was there pressed grass where she lay?
>>
>
>Lay he brode waking?
>
>One of the most interesting things (to me) about many of these dreams is,
>rather than the having of them, the remembering of them. I have had, like
>all of you, I suppose, hundreds of memorable dreams in my age of man; but
>can remember, now, only a handful (and, alas, they are irrelevant). The
>urge, or need, to remember a dream upon waking often fails, even when
>intensively cultivated; and often (always?) dreams can only be reliably
>encoded in the memory if they are narrated in words, immediately, and
>repeatedly, in subsequent conscious experience. What has fascinated me
>about many of these dream-stories (like Anne's, for example) is their
>story quality: the way they have been assimilated as narratives into
>waking interpretations of self, given to oneself, and to others; they do
>work. Dreams in themselves, in the having, are less interesting than the
>invention of them, and the disposing of them. What do we come to know
>about ourselves not from our dreams, but from the way we need to use, and
>share certain dreams?
>
>Is this something that we have tended to overlook in the interference of
>Archimago in Redcrosse's dream-sleep? The epistemological confusion in The
>Faerie Queene (for Redcrosse, for Arthur) about whether they have seen
>(aisthesis) the truth (episteme), or merely a vision (doxa) obviously
>draws on the vast skeptical tradition (Sextus Empiricus, Academica,
>Diogenes Laertius; but also Greek tragedy) newly available and current in
>the 1580s and 1590s after Etienne's editions of 1563-69; but ought we to
>be thinking not only of the epistemological status of these dreams as
>evidentia, or 'warrant', but also about the way they subsequently become
>narrativized in psychological/social transactions? Redcrosse's encounter
>with Errour precedes his hermeneutical error, and the forsaking of Una;
>might we think of Spenser as psychologizing the very human need to
>interpret and tell a story about a dream that fits the contextual
>requirements of a subsequent social, psychological, political situation?
>I've obviously been using rhetorical terms throughout--inventio,
>dispositio--and I think that perhaps this is an idea basic to a rhetorical
>understanding of how information is met with, acquired, and systematized:
>does disposito in fact contaminate inventio? Are we, like Redcrosse (like
>Arthur?), psychologically speaking prisoners of the need of the now? Do we
>unwittingly rewrite experience in the now to serve a future need? Do we
>not have, but remember, dreams?
>
>This is what rivets me in Wyatt's poem every time: 'It was no dreme'. The
>sudden interference of this judgment (had we any reason to think it a
>dream before this line?) completely reverses for me, in the opening of the
>third stanza, what has come before. I had accepted the story, till then;
>suddenly I was aware that its status was contested; and in that
>contestation, the assertion of its truth becomes the movement that effects
>its historical positioning, not in my perception, but it my memory. It is
>a movement like mourning, and it is a grief that like Wyatt, I want to
>circulate.
>
>Ultimately the truth value of the dream or vision may not be so important
>as the memorialization of communicating, circulating, narrativizing, and
>applying a dream. I lay brode waking.
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