A Dream Within a Dream

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Take this kiss upon thy brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

-- "A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe

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Dream

Now that was a dream, not a good dream, not quite a nightmare, a little unsettling, opening up a new perspective, another way of seeing my small life ... Pop left the house early to get groceries by himself, leaving me behind, and he comes home with a pretty light load. He announces with the hard air of a dictatorial diktat that we need to get fewer groceries from now on, and he tells me that I need to shorten my lists by a good thirteen, fourteen items. As I look through what Pop brought home, I see that a lot of the food that I like did not make the cut. I turn frantic.

On top of this, the dream has yet another strong, provocative component. In this dreamscape, it is as though it is not just Pop and I living together and making a household. In this parallel universe, we are a troika. It is Pop, me, and ... Jack. My first immediate interpretation is that Jack never made the leap to getting a job and having girlfriends, much less a wife and children in this timeline. It is the life we knew when I first returned from school, though mother still dies early in this world, whether by her own hand or not, I cannot say. Like me, and like Pop, Jack is simply older. I suppose this is actually a more pathetic situation in that Pop is now supporting two reasonably able-bodied men who will not get jobs, and who are not just twenty-somethings, but forty-somethings. The reader's nostrils must clench!

This is a combination that I have never considered before. By the time mother killed herself, Jack had buried our brotherly relationship so deep underground and for so many years, breeding so much animosity between us, that it became unthinkable that we could live together as brothers again. Moreover, if I was ever inclined to imagine that there would just be three of us making a family, it would have been mother, Jack, and me, with Pop being the odd one out. Before mother died, Pop was always rather distant. He never really related and talked meaningfully with either me or Jack, and mother would be our mediator to Pop. He was the typical aloof father, fit for a 1950s sitcom, minus the concluding little speeches of fatherly wisdom. I remember, when mother died, that was one of my anxious concerns, having to relate to Pop without any mediator. I actually had to come to know and become familiar with my father, a near stranger, in whose hand my life now rested entirely. For instance, without having mother around, would he start insisting that I get a job?

However, this dream seems to let Jack keep some of the maturity and confidence from his real life, such that one could wonder whether it might be better to think that it is not so much that Jack never got a job or started having a sex life, but that he somehow became separated from Jill and the kids and has simply moved in with Pop and me. While I am like a petulant child in my ire over Pop's groceries and his new demands, Jack is perfectly accepting and even shows a little irritation over my hysterics, as though he were almost at the end of his patience in his acceptance of my emotional and intellectual limitations. More disturbingly, this scene gives me some idea of how he, mother, and Pop have actually always seen me all these years.

Chris Rock

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What about conservative comedians? You and Dennis Miller were on SNL together. Is it just because I don’t share his politics that I find him less funny, or is there something about conservative stand-up that just doesn’t work?

Yeah, he was there my first year. He used to bust my balls. He’d come into my office and say, “Hey, Rock, how’s that ‘next Eddie’ thing working out?” Oh, he’s definitely less funny. You know where he’s going. Smart as hell, but you know where he’s going. The middle’s where it’s at, comically. I mean, what do you got? Miller, Stewart, Maher.

Miller on the right, Stewart in the middle, Maher on the left?

And the most successful guy’s …

Stewart?

Stewart’s middle-to-left, but he’s still more in the middle.

In Miller’s case, do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?

I’ll say this. Poor people laugh harder than rich people. Especially black people, they laugh with their feet, too.

I know that it’s Miller who first introduced you to Robin Williams. What did you make of his tragic end?

Comedians kill themselves. Talk to 100 comedians this week, everybody knows somebody who killed themselves. I mean, we always say ignorance is bliss. Well, if so, what’s the opposite? Some form of misery. Being a comedian, 80 percent of the job is just you notice shit, which is a trait of schizophrenics too. You notice things people don’t notice.

And it either makes you crazy or it doesn’t. How do you defend against it yourself?

You try to give yourself other things to focus on. I always say, my children saved me from my miserable self.

-- Chris Rock at Vulture.com

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