Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1009092348550.21169@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: ...Tomei
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2010 23:49:17 -0400 (EDT)
...Tomei [ ...and then just last night, reading Ovid's Tristia, and his exile near Tomis also spelled Tomi, somewhere in Romania, the following begins to unravel further, uncannily adding another layer to the message/massage. "Tomis! Outlandish name! With what bitterness the storm-tossed poet speaks of 'The Tomitans, situated in some corner of the world'! [...] Tomis(1) ((1) - Tomis, not Tomi, is indicated by the manuscripts and is the older form of the name.) (the modern Constantza) lay on an elevated and rocky part of the coast, about sixty-five miles south-west of the nearest mouth of the Danube, in that part of Roumania now called the Dobrudja." (From the introduction by A.L. Wheeler, Loeb.) "In AD 8, the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-17) was banished here by Augustus and died there eight years later. He laments his exile in Tomis in his poems the Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto. Tomis was "by his account a town located in a war-stricken cultural wasteland on the remotest margins of the empire". A statue of Ovid stands in the Ovid Square (Piata Ovidiu) of Constanta, in front of the History Museum (the former City Hall)." (Wikipedia.) So Tomei is surely Tomi, an outland Italy; of course my mother had been to Romania, bringing me back two gifts, a photographic book of Bran's castle, and an hourglass... The original dream/text follows. ] sometimes a dream heralds, not the debris of the day, but the residue of the future. this afternoon i had such, discordant with my life in the narrowed interval of hours, weeks, months. my mother was in the back, by the dresser in the bedroom; she said she's 84 or 85; dressed in a maroon 1940's outfit, sleek, she seemed about 40. before this my father, in his brown bathrobe, was walking slowly through the kitchen, near the cabinets on the left - he's 96 (my mother died at 80), there were french legion- naires, in parade dress, surrounding him, emptying the cabinets, or perhaps looking into the cabinets 'already swept clean.' and i had walked down the hall to my mother, who said he was quite old, and near Tomei, or the cliffs of Tomei (pronounced toe-my), and he might have been lear, or shakespeare, and as for me, i was to flee the cliffs, the nubbed edge of the harsh sea, for that were death. and i woke, because my greatest fear is death, the thought of death terrifies and immobilizes me, i weep, out of control, i cry out, i turn to panic. and when i woke, i looked up Tomei on the net, and there were Tomeis in italy, seemingly without relevance, and less for those in madagascar. but there was a Tomei tollroad running near the sea in japan, and near tokyo and nagoya, and i followed it on the maps as it entered and left a mountain tunnel which seemed quite long. and i knew that something occurred in that tunnel, or would occur, or would have occurred, had i not already witnessed the name, that would have relevance for me. and now i am left with that, the name Tomei with no relation to the actress who was in a play by shakespeare to be sure, the name which so asserted itself as geographical, that i can only connect it to the nerve of the tollroad, and the unsupported, presupposed, event, already never happening, already lost, to me, already unaccountable.