Press: Frieze issue 210
In the April 2020 issue of frieze magazine, Robert Glück‘s "A Dream Journal of the HIV/AIDS Crisis" revisits dream journals left by his late partner Ed Aulerich-Sugai.
Read an excerpt below:
"Reading Ed’s dream journals again, I am startled by the originals of images that I put in my poems. This task returns me to the labours of our relationship: looking after Ed, anticipating him, trying to make a career happen for him. He sleepwalked into a full scholarship at the San Francisco Art Institute and painted heroic nudes rising and falling through clouds and sky. (‘The expressive body, naked and exploding, arches and twists in space.’) I spent whole seasons inside his paintings and sculptures, driving all over town to find the right watercolour paper and brushes. I went from not having a life to giving it away. Am I writing this for him? His dreams go through me, they place him inside me, the bitterness and chaos of illness, his anger. I’m surprised and even guilty that I often appeared to him in his sleep, as though I don’t allow him into mine.
…
Twenty-three years after we met, Ed entered his dreams entirely. He wandered while staying in bed. These were periods of tremendous activity. He generated images to suture an impossible wound. ‘I get scared when I see the dormant garden and the sun so low on the horizon,’ he told me. ‘People die this time of year, responding to a natural cycle, and, when I opened the attic door, my dead body fell into my arms.’ He circled his cell, the condemned spinning out images of dissolution and harm – useless communication, pure communication. Ed’s whole life was a flow of images, visual then verbal, furious and sweet. Image-making and isolation describe my life with Ed. ‘We are a source,’ he said in a dream. ‘May your year be as clear as the glass in your hand,’ he whispered on his last New Year’s Eve, raising his glass."