Frogs and Eggs

Busy cluttered dreams that derive very clearly from real life incidents; me trying to get a sick cat from one place to another, me trying to phone Mum, me trying to adjust my sleeping. Only at one point was there an interesting aspect of new dream lexicon to it. There was a strange ornate clock, with two small eggs underneath. I turned one around and it was smashed open. Looking inside I saw the yolk and white as though it had already been cooked, though runny, and in that goo were a whole bunch of scrunched up dead spiders, and one, maybe two tiny but very long legged frogs. I tried to reach in, but it meant possibly touching the spiders, and I wasn't a hundred percent convinced they were all dead. I didn't get to examine the other egg.

It feels to me like a message from my subconscious; I am done with the Spiders Bride type telling for now, whatever that means. Something different is awake, delicate and difficult to reach but there. Accessing it, working out a new environment for it before risking harm to the egg where it currently lives is my job. I should look at that other egg too at some point. I get it, I think, and even this is not lurking far down in the psyche. A few days ago, when my head was full of the sierra, I tried to create an AI depiction, and some attempts were more successful than others. On DALL-E 2 with this prompt; sierra nevada, mountains of light and rock, pawpaws, olive trees, almond trees, made in glass, digital fantasy art, photorealistic, Hyper detailed, fantasy art, beautiful fantasy landscape, realistic, natural, cosmic sky, detailed full-color, nature I got this strange thing:



And there they are. Of course, the prompt never mentioned eggs. But this might be the source of the imagery, considering how very mirror-like my dreams have been in true Alice through the Looking Glass fashion.

Scotland is an immensely inspiring country, with layer upon layer of story and history, mythology and evocation seeped into it. Creating a new one is not easy, one almost doesn't want to. Why move on from Tam Lin when I have barely begun to experience the rose woods of Carterhaugh?* Why would I leave the lands of Kelpie and Selkie, when I have hardly begun to traverse them? I love the old magic. But I suspect it is not for me to use, rather to experience as a personal joy. I could create a gripping yarn type tale about Rosslyn Chapel, but it's been done, done, done.

I think that is one of the things about magical places. They frown at the bard who upon seeing them only thinks 'I can make a story out of this.' In its own way this kind of thinking is as mechanical and exploitative as any other. I need to be conscious of it, while never forgetting that art is always artifice in some way.

*No rose woods at Carterhaugh any more. One must dream them back into being.

Meanwhile the Cat

Mismatch has had a misadventure.

I barely noticed it under all her white fur, something that looked like a wound from a fight. but R thought it was getting bigger, and her mood was different; she was rather subdued. She came and sat on my lap for a couple of evenings, clearly in need of consolation. I took her to the vet on Friday, and they clipped away the fur. The vet was perplexed, said the skin didn't look like wounded, so much as blistered, dry skin peeling away. The skin itself was ever so slightly tacky.
It could be a pretty severe allergy, so we are keeping an eye on it, but even this is not what the vet thinks. She said it looked like a burn.

But how could Mismatch have burned herself?
The only answer that occurred to me starts with a peculiar habit of hers. When she's freaked (which happens all the time cos she's at least partially deaf) she runs and hides. One of her favourite hiding places is a small gap in the wall behind the bath, absolutely impossible to reach. But there's a big hot water pipe down there, and she's a bit of a pudding these days, if she hid down there, no way could she turn around. She would be lying between the wall and the pipe, and if it got too hot, would have to back out. It's the correct side for her to have been burnt by pressing up against the pipe. The vet nodded.

'Look,' she said, 'you can see a vertical outline. Is it a vertical pipe?'

It is indeed a vertical pipe.

But Mismatch wouldn't just sit there letting her skin burn, surely. Then again, she can be a complete idiot, and all sorts of things scare her. I have known her since she was barely weaned, and she still runs from me on occasion. Maybe she didn't feel it happening through all that fur.
I have blocked access to that space, and she has been lamenting all around the house. We have another appointment tomorrow, just in case what we are looking at is some kind of bizarre allergy after all.

I hope the little dafty is OK.