II. Please give yourself time to dream. - Fernando Modesto

as one would cup a pair of breasts, St. Mary’s breasts: a virgin teat for a viand or 2, steaming rice topped w/ the minute meatball of pure nipple. Are those her legs parting in the intergalactic void, is that her smooth frog in the middle of the mystic foliage, all of it Mother Mary’s / Mother Earth’s / Gaia’s?

• Association: I will leave this erased, then blank—
• Connexion: 
• Contiguity: In his early writings, Freud was preoccupied w/ symbolism: What did this image from a dream stand for, what did that scene from a dream represent? This is the internal relation occurring w/in the sign—the signifier’s relationship w/ the signified—that begs for interpretation. This is the symbolic.          
• This is chao standing for rice standing for infinity.
• This is ciao standing for goodbye standing for finitude.
• This is Oedipus constructing an entire universe for a mother.
• This is the man in fear of castration.
• This is the tree of genealogy—arboreal & rooted, static.
• This is the erasure of your composure. As always.

Yet, for all the fullness of dreams in terms of symbolism, for all its richness beneath the erasures, its logic is not run by metaphor whether solely or at all; what is dream-like is necessarily metonymic; in its free associations it becomes boundless: Where ciao becomes chao rather than mere adieu, dream bids adieu to the planar in favor of the multiplanar, of galaxies, earth, St. Mary—of dream as second heaven.

(Freud was once an icon of Surrealism. Does it surprise you that on occasion you’re reminded of the lithographs of a young Joan Miro in some of Modesto’s strokes, fleeting & flitting in the ether despite the permanence of paint & ink?)  Continued...