* Robert Kelly and Denis Cosgrove were introduced by artist and conference organizer Paul Hotvedt.

I'm mostly going to read a few pages tonight, now, and say a little bit, and I have to begin by saying that what I say tonight, I would not have said had we had this congress at the end of August, rather than in the middle of October.

I've been in Lawrence before, maybe twenty-five years ago. It's grown quite a lot. It's still a very agreeable place. It's a place that-well, this morning, Charlotte and I saw our first Swainson's hawk skimming down over the grassland, looking for-the book says it's looking for a rat or a gopher, so we looked for a rat or a gopher, too, but we saw only the hawk, and it stayed there for about an hour, going back and forth. So, I'll think of this visit as the hawk visit.

I used to dream about a city, a city that shimmered by the power of dream, through the daytime sense of stone, and concrete, and asphalt, of the common city where I was born. Now that city has changed. The so-called real one, the one where the towers fell, fell into the shadow where Castle Gardens had fallen long before, and the Battery itself, and the aquarium, where an electric eel in its murky box of water on display lit up my childhood. Early lessons in what it meant-eel, electricity, Edison, floodlights, the World's Fair, the War. Of course, I'm a New Yorker. Of course, I am used to things being gone, which makes it all the more important that we recollect together the interior city, or let me call it the inherent city. Re-collect the traces of the city that inheres inside the real one, the one anybody can see, or see until a terrorist destroys it. But the inherent city can only be lost when the image of it fades from the mind of the dreamer or the visionary, Shinar Plain, or Lot in Sodom, or Aeneas's Rome, or Brigham Young's City of the Saints. Or say, I think, that the inherent city can never be destroyed; it can only be forgotten, which is why we have come here today, to unforget it, to unforget the dream.

When this conference was proposed-I guess we talked about it a year ago, over a year ago, perhaps the summer or autumn of 2000-when this conference was proposed, it was just supposed to be one more interesting thing that we could get to say about humans and landscape, women and geography, one more interesting variation in the long attentive sarabande of intelligence that we dance with Carl Sauer, and Charles Olson, and Edgar Anderson, James Malin, and Gary Snyder, and Ken Irby. Then suddenly, what we are doing here now seems immensely and differently important. We have suddenly been put in charge of the indestructible and, by paradox, we have to take very good care of it.

The longer I stay in any place, the clearer it becomes that we inhabit different levels of time. The ground we walk on is a recent word, but the sentence has been speaking for such a long time. We know that every land is a different land, the alien shore imbedded in our own, the land before this town that still lingers in the town, as the town. The town is the skin we see of all that's been. The town that we were reminded of, of 1854 and all that came after-massacres and posses and the grief of that, the quiet resurrections in a town, and all lying there, always present. "There's Quantrill now," said Ken Irby last night as we walked down the street, pointing to a figure on a wall somewhere, in a window. "There's Quantrill now." So, that hundred and some years doesn't simply disappear. It simply deepens our awareness of this place and this time. We know that there are strange, half-magical writers like Mary Butts in the wonderful story "Mappa Mundi" and Charles Williams in his strange novel Descent into Hell. The way they have seen and described the way time and place coinhere, the way Lutetia still lives inside Paris or Aeneas's Rome inside Moravia's Rome. All land, all place enshrines its history. A place never lets go of what happened there, but there are special places where the times show through. And one of the things it means to grow up in a place or come back to a place in which you grew up is to know the times of the place-your times, your ages, all mapped on the supposed actuality. You walk on the street.

Basho- says, "One quality that poems have is a kind of sadness, like a man dressed up in all his finery, on his way to a party, only the man is an old man." You walk on the street of all your life and somehow, step by step, you have to master the times imbedded in that place. If the place is Rome, then you have to be Aeneas, Virgil, Bruno, Verdi, Moravia, all at once, as well as whoever you are. Don't you understand? The dead become everyone and you become everyone who lived before you. It may be that geography also is genetics.

But there's another dimension to all this, that I've been excited by and bothered by-can't tell-for years now, the place we dream. And that's the subject that this conference got started by, an essay called "Hypnogeography." It still strikes us all as a funny word-to write down the map of the world you find in dream. That's simple enough. Now, that follows from a kind of major hypothesis; that's another fancy word-we can never have enough long words; long words are wonderful, because long words give the mind a chance to rebut them as they pass by. Whereas a short word, like "puff," you don't know what to do with it. But a word like "hypnogeography" or "vososquasm," a disease from which I pretend to suffer, these words are long enough to give you a chance to bite and spit out if necessary, or to swallow. But, a hypothesis that exercises me a lot is that we talk casually, or at least since the late nineteenth century we've talked casually, about the language of dream and dream language, and all that. And that has meant, I think, traditionally the "language of dream," kind of "this means that" effect of the dream. The ancient Babylonians said that if you dreamt of eating your own excrement, it meant that great good fortune was on the way. And we find the old dream tablets and the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus contain lots of material, translation so to speak, of "this means that." In that sense, the dream as a language is a familiar thing. But from the days of Freud and his immediate predecessors and his followers, dream language became more an exploration of what the dream was saying. Not about what would happen to you when you dreamed this; rather, the dream was an endless conversation that you were having with yourself. Or the dream was, according to some theories, an endless conversation that the god, or the over-soul, or the spirits, or the demons were having with you. In other words, the dream was, and remains, in Freudian and Jungian analysis, and even, one suspects, in Lacanian analysis, unless you get very deeply into it, the dream remains the voice of the other speaking to the self.

But that's not what language is in most of our experiences. Most of us learn language by being surrounded, by being wordless, surrounded by the other, and having to acquire words to address the other with. We have to speak to the other, saying "Feed me. Love me. Give me what I need." These commonsense notions of language as an exchange between the self and the other have traditionally for the dream analysis been pointed always in the same direction. So the hypothesis that came to me some years ago is what happens if we take the language the other way around and assume that the dream that I have is indeed language and it's indeed a word, but it's not a word that God is saying to me, or that my unconscious is saying to me, but that I am saying to you, as Whitman says, "whoever you are?" Suppose then that dream is the language of the self to the other. It's an hypothesis I think worth thinking about, worth examining.

If the dream talks to other, the dream is the self speaking to the other, a dream then is a word that you are speaking to the world, then it might be worthwhile to investigate what the dream says to the world, what that story is that the dream is telling, a story that you are not ready consciously or wakefully to tell the world. Perhaps a story you need to tell to the world. That's why it occurred to me years ago that I should try to gather a bunch of victims together who dreamt a lot and who would write their dreams down and publish them in a very small compass. I live in a tiny hamlet called Annandale, named for that unfortunate valley in Scotland where Lockerbie is and where things fall from the sky, the little town of Annandale, which is barely more than the college that's in it. And I suggested we start the Annandale Dream Gazette, which was a brief, short-lived publication, which a couple of good people, generous people as Paul would say, got together and put down their dreams every day and published them once in a while, on the theory that if dream is language speaking to the other, the other had better have a chance to hear it. Otherwise, we're just mumbling in the shower, singing Verdi in the shower, the way I would, but no one was allowed to hear.

If that's then the major hypothesis, the minor hypothesis coupled with it is that dream might have something to do then with the world of geography, the word of place. The specific words that we dream when we dream of cities, as I explained in that tiny piece called "Hypnogeography" itself, two or three pages long, I oughtn't even to call it a story or an essay. I have all my life dreamt of New York City in a set of ways that have been standard throughout all the dream years. It's quite like New York in a lot of ways and quite unlike it in others, but it's repeatedly the same way. Only last year, for the first time, has another avenue opened in my dream New York and it opened by running across Broadway, forming an X with Broadway, an astonishing thing, since Broadway is the marker of true north in Manhattan Island where all the streets are running map north, but Broadway runs true north. Suddenly, another great St. Andrew's cross had been made. A great saltire had been declared and another avenue had gone off at an angle, reaching a cathedral, of all things-a thing New York does not notably need, since it has half a dozen cathedrals of one kind of another already that no one goes to except Tibetan Lamas when they need a place to perform to the white folk. But there was this cathedral. I have to deal with that. But it seems to me that the place, then, that we dream, the place that we standardly dream, not so much the dream of one night when you dream that an explosion occurs in such-and-such a place, but rather the dreams that you come back to, the dreams that you return to night after night or year after year, when you dream a predictable variant on them-that's the stuff that we need to hear about. And I would like someday a great mapping of that to come to pass.

The problem is, of course, the endless trash of the personal. I speak of the eel, the electric eel, the old aquarium, my memories, the child nose pressed against the dirty glass from the noses of all the children who had pressed against it before, looking at the eel swimming in the water dirty from its own excrement, the sense of just the warping, the thickening, the thickness of memory in shape-all the personal stuff that we bring to the dream. The dream crosses it and returns to the world. That's important. It's hard for me to look at the World Trade Center ruins and say, "Yes, I miss the World Trade Center, but I also miss that eel that was there sixty years ago and that was wiped out long ago and the Battery Aquarium was wiped away long ago for other reasons altogether, said to be connected with yet another war, yet another time." But these individual instances of personal memory seem to become the trash, or as the alchemists said, the feces from which we begin our operation, so that in the dream, as you know, with however you approach the dream, the individual details of your personal life that flood out into the great plain of Shinar, where the dream is building its tower of Babel, those individual feces, traces, the mere corruptions of memories, as you'd say, grow the Temple of Memory, memoria, from which we might learn something about this geography of the world that I've been talking about.

So I would just want to end by saying that I do want the hypnogeography to be a subject of inquiry. I want generous people to record their dreams when they dream about such things. They can do it for other purposes, too. But I think we might be able to assemble a dream geography of our world, as a dream geography of Lawrence, Kansas, might emerge Sunday afternoon from Soren Larsen's workshop in mapping. That may happen. The notion that we might, in fact, be able to map something that is documentable, that we'd have something there at the end.

The goal then would be to find all the versions of a place that are needed to know the place.

I wanted to finish with reading what happened once when I tried to talk about a place. I tried to talk about the house I lived in. "I live in an old house that has no address," I began. Then I had to go to a footnote and understand what that meant-no address: "A road, but no number-off east, beyond the sumac and the hill, the loosestrife of our small marsh anxious these nights with singing frogs, so there's this ode of spring. There is a crossroads where the highway runs fast past the almost unseeable entrance of a road whose name is like mine. But that's beyond 9G, beyond time, beyond the Ennead that stands this side of the Dodecad-that's a region between the Nine and the Zodiac in which no fixed knowledge is. No steady knowing. Nine Gods look up and worship. Twelve look down and see me standing there, afraid as any four-year-old to cross the blazing highway. Corner of the Dog-Nine Gods. Turn west with me. And then the house, with no address, too close to the Post Office to need one, just two houses down towards the stream. Known by name. This is the center of a vast, invisible city. Yesterday as we drove along, I saw a broken pump, its handle rusted, pointing towards the mountains. And saw the ultimate city, now only a dream inhering in that space. Certainly it too will have post offices and streets among its lily pools and tiger walks; I am less sure it will have numbers. No address except the name of the city, the City; and the mail gets there. When I first moved to this town, I computed that by the grid of my city down the river, I live now on 2,097th Street-West 2,097th Street-at the corner of Broadway. But that city is no longer anybody's system. The grid is more spacious now, builds up as well as out, comprises the nearer stars, has its root in water."

I was trying to write about what it looked like to sit in a particular chair in my house and look across the room. I don't think we've paid enough attention to interior landscape, but that's for another conference-the conference of the crowded desk, the stuff under the bed, the things you find when you open the drawer. That is our Iliad yet to be written. But now we need a proper geography.

That's all I wanted to say now. I'll say more things tomorrow. I'd love to hear your comments, or reactions, or rebuttals, or castigations, or your reprisals-no, not reprisals! Renewals.

Audience member: In Douglas County, there are no places and no knowledge. Every intersection has numbers for both ways.

Kelly: It does. It does. But they're only available by use of the God of the machine. It's triangulation. We must talk about the triangle some time, how the triangle is what's left out of all of these issues, the way in which I can connect with you deeply only by some triangulation. And we keep forgetting that and that's why we keep walking against the-into the mirror, constantly. Mirrors resist triangles. Now you can find any place with the numbers.

Audience member: How would you contrast the dream place with the so-called real place?

Kelly: Well, the so-called real. I was afraid there might be a philosopher who would notice that. See, there's one of those short words-real. Oh! A horrific word. That's the worst four-letter word in all the world-real.

I would contrast it simply by the fact that I can see it only when I'm asleep and then remember it. It's very real when I'm asleep and less real when I'm awake. And when I'm awake I can't quite walk down that street, but I can remember it. So, I'm not saying that waking is more real than sleeping, God knows. I think perhaps the opposite, probably. But certainly whatever is conventionally called the waking world, maybe the waking world and the sleeping world-but that suggests the world is awake. It may not be. It may just be you, or just me, or some triangle between us. In proper terms, I think the contrast is that the sleep world, the dream world always seems slightly more persuasive to me than the waking one. The waking one where I'm walking down the street, it's always something of a surprise-"Oh yes, this is where Broadway is crossed by 17th Street, and I'll turn that corner, and there'll be that closed coffee shop,"-but in the dream, I may not know about the coffee shop, but it feels tremendously right. It feels, "This is how it actually is," whereas the real is only how it happens to seem at the moment. I think in dream I'm less of a skeptic than I am in waking. I'm speaking from my own few-and-far-between dreams. (One of the reasons why I want to get all those generous lads and lasses to write their dreams is that I have so few of them myself, which is my great shame and secret; I am not in that sense a dreamer. Therefore I look at the dream like a starved child looking through the window at the candy. The dream place seems, as I said before, to have this persuasive factness about it in the way that waking doesn't. Waking is iffy. Anything might happen, but in the dream, life just steadily runs along.

Audience member: [Question about the way travel in dreams is discontinuous.]

Kelly: That's not my experience of my own dreams, which are lamentably poor in jump cuts; I have to walk the whole way. I wish I could do that. I'd like to know your way of getting right to the goal-later tell me your secret. But I mean, we don't know that. We make grand statements about dreams. The poets of this world make the grand statements, and yet the difference you and I discuss may be vastly important-that you dream jump cuts, and I dream without them. That might be far more important than anything else that we dream about, the very structure of the dream experience. I don't usually dream scenically, in the sense that was mentioned, but rather continuously and rather wonderfully boringly-the way lovemaking is boring; that it just is this wonderful going-on, in that sense that you don't have to do anything. It does itself when it's genuine. You're not doing something to someone; you are being with the experience. In that way, dream has a wonderful, pervasive ongoingness, in my sense, without the scenic quality of "I am witnessing an event," or "I'm leaping through an event."

But these structures may be terribly important. That might be a kind of macrostructural difference that we want to explore sometime.