"I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours"---Bob D.

[Mark Kohut]

Dear Plisters,

Last night, I dreamt about Thomas Pynchon. Or really, what we most know,
his work.

It seems also to have been about Bob D because of recent exchanges with
Joseph,
and involuntary thinking about him, Bobby. And one venerable Pynchon lover
who went on record recently
wanting a new Pynchon work and virtually criticizing/challenging him for
not producing one during the Trump years.

It is a simple dream. I am standing around with a group of Plisters, most
unseen in my dream mind's eye and one of them,
naming no names here, said Yes, he had read the new Pynchon. I was
surprised, of course, but I knew no one else had and I waited with the rest
of us
for this person to say something about it. He was silent however. We all
held our bated breath in my dream until I was suddenly
somewhere else in another room where the new Pynchon work was gift-wrapped
and kinda in suspension or on a single shelf I could not see.
A little above my height, and again, there were others here but I saw no
one.

Then a pair of hands quickly took the wrapping off the new work---it was
still not close to me/us in reality. (I knew where this came from; from
a bad novel in a book group that I have stopped out of for good because of
moments like this: a person opened a gift and then put the wrapping
back on and this was another thing I did not believe as written. Most
gift-wrapped gifts are simply ripped open and unable to be put back
together
virtually intact. Imo. No words to make us believe in any why of an
exception. Also, the hands opening image probably comes from learning of
the incredible
success of a YouTube genre where people--mostly kids, I guess---love
watching presents being opened, hands on only, so to speak. )

In my dream, the hands tried to put the wrapping back on but I said, maybe
shouting, "See, you can't do that". What was revealed, however,  was not a
book, but
some kind of wooden toy. Compact, square, with small sides like raised
edges on three of them, one the left (as we look) higher and sturdier than
the right
and the back just barely higher than the open front, as accessible as any
surface and not facing me directly but eyes left.

Then I laughed aloud and said, "See, he surpassed all our words about his
next book---[this is certainly more Dylan in my current mind than Thomas,
in that
 how he spent his career overturning his last work all the time basically
has permeated my mind]----and then I was laughing more and telling
everyone:
"Thomas's last work is beyond words, he is telling us....It looks like a
puzzle but it is a simple construction.".........[I think Joseph saying
straight on that the reading
of glaring in that passage of Mike's was not arcane nor hidden, which
touched a memory of mine about something Tom said in a letter which went
like this (paraphrase)---
Some people read too much into what I've written; all of it is right there
on the page, he wrote somebody if I remember correctly.]

I think Wittgenstein on What can't be said---the mystical, to not get too
specific---is in this dream here as well.

Then I woke up feeling healed another morning, so to speak.