Tuesday, May 25, 2010

I just dreamed of a blue house here in Toronto. It does not exist here according to google. What is this about Facebook? There is a site for people to leave that excellent networking site, because they are fed up with having 6ooo friends they don't actually know. My Facebook site has about thirty people I do know and I find it useful and entertaining, especially as I can follow their posts on my cell phone. Why are people turning into Luddites all of a sudden? Big brother is not intrusive and we are well past 1984 and the horrors predicted by a brilliant writer, who was nevertheless virulently anti- communist. I would have not been that unhappy in soviet Russia in my youth, I feel. East Germany perhaps, certainly not Hungary and I think I would have been happy to perform my function in a society according to what the state deemed to be my talents and rewarded them appropriately. Perhaps this sentiment is why I left England and settled in Canada, rather than the USA, which in many, many ways I greatly admired, but there was a downside of what I knew about the States, and their anti -communism was part of that downside. Unlike my eldest, I have little bile reserved for "nanny states". I think a government should promulgate, "The greatest happiness for the greatest number". This is because of the political philosophy to which I was exposed at an English public school. I did not consider myself a socialist until quite late, working on TV documentaries for Granada in 1970. It was from Manchester that I applied to emigrate here and I was accepted quite easily because another accident of my youth made me bi-lingual and my trade was deemed to be one which was short of technicians in Canada. My best friend was a uni-lingual accountant and he was refused one year later. These are early morning ramblings on waking from this dream of a blue house. Jung claims that the house in dreams is a symbol of the self, hence the ridiculous dream in ourwaking life of owning our own. But why blue? I suppose blue is the colour of protection, of being shielded and of providing what we crave for others. It is time I soon got back to work.

5 comments:

Tess Kincaid said...

Blue is considered the color of the soul and the desire for relaxation. That is one BLUE house!!

French Fancy... said...

Oh I love this house.

As for Facebook - I've got a couple of hundred friends on there but at least half are from a bichon frise online club and I'm happy to swap banter (and advice) with them.

I'm with you on this luddite approach people are developing

marc aurel said...

I remmember there was actually a fellow called Ludd, whom the luddites followed, breaking up farm machines, which were putting them out to pasture, as it were. I am a bit grouchy as I started smoking a pie, cigarettes and one cigar at the start of May and have just quit again. Not possible without the patch and blue is, I suppose, the colour for physical health protection, hence the massive amounts of turqoise worn and made by the Hopi. The dark blue of lapis was, I was instructed, the color for protecting mental health. It made sense to me, since these were the approximate colors of the day and night skies.
Vivid dreams and long walks with our wonderful black lab. It is good to live near the lake, ah, but the ocean, the ocean; I ache to see even the Mediterranean sea again.
My father gave me "Down to the Sea in Ships", a Burl Ives collection for my twelfth birthday soon after the signed copy of "The Wayfaring Stranger", which he bought back from a trip, which included a visit to Macy"s, where he met Mr Ives by chance. I have them still and it was only later that I got into The Weavers and Alan Lomax. When I was first a second assistant fim editor, we were doing a show about popular music for the BBC and the producer gave me a tape of Leadbelly. Although, with financial independance independance, I bought Bob Dylan records, he did seem terribly derivative of what I was already most familiar with. I still sing snatches of Desolation Row, Oxford Town and Corrina, Corrina, though. I don't know the titles of my favorites.
I sang Ben Gunn and John Hardy to my boys when they were little. Still rambling. Wandering and wondering. Thanks you two for being my most faithful, un judgemental readers.

Hels said...

How did you not consider yourself a socialist until quite late? You have every fine and moral impulse that would make your values stand out from the people around. I am proud to read your work!

marc aurel said...

Well Hels, that's quite a compliment and especially affecting as it comes from you who combine two of my three passions, (writing, architecture and music), so well. I especially like your insights into public and domestic Australian buildings. I used to dream regularly that I was living in a large Au town on the Pacific.Your articles have brought the dreams to a stop, as you show me the realities rather than the imaginations of my unconscious.