Sunday June 16, 2019

A sunny late-afternoon walk along Regent’s Canal observing houseboats and seagulls reawakens a memory of the previous night’s dream: I’ve inherited a boat shaped like a VW Beetle, only the docking point for the boat lies just prior to a small waterfall, causing me to fret about my inability to locate the nautical equivalent of a parking brake. (In the dream, this object that I’m searching for and that fails to materialize is very clearly understood to be a parking brake rather than, say, an anchor.) Yet as I pause to write out this recollection, an owner of a narrowboat — a young dude with Dr. Martens, a thin mustache, sunglasses, and a radio playing Elvis and Hendrix — pulls up beside me and I lend him a hand manipulating the gate of a locks system to help him lower his boat into the lengths ahead. From this, I deduce a provisional ontological scheme or order featuring pairs of successive “stages” or “levels”: the first involving anxiety as preemptive, unconsciously manufactured fantasy-construct, the second involving an overcoming of this fantasy-construct through intuitive acts that instigate learning and growth.