THE DREAM
HENRI ROUSSEAU, 1910
Nobody could ever explain the couch. A naked woman, on a red velvet couch. The fancy kind, straight out of a Paris parlor. Sitting in the middle of a jungle. Not near one. In it. Vines, lotus flowers, an elephant in the leaves, a snake. A full moon up top, and two lions down below, staring straight out at you. And off in the dark, a little figure playing a flute. The whole thing is so green it's almost loud. People kept asking Rousseau about it. Bothered him enough that he wrote a poem to go with the painting. The gist: Yadwigha, fast asleep, deep in a beautiful dream, hears a snake charmer's pipe drifting in, and floats off into it. So the couch isn't in the jungle. She's dreaming the jungle. We're inside her sleep. So. Who's Yadwigha? A woman he loved, long, long ago. A Polish girl, from back when he was young. Gone, by the time he painted this. Sit with that. An old man, painting her young again. Naked, and somehow not in danger. And he builds her a whole paradise to do it in. Leaf by leaf, fifty shades of green, just so she'd have somewhere impossible to sleep. And this is the last thing he ever painted. He finished it, and a few months later, he was gone. So that's where his mind went, right at the end. Not home. Here. To her. One more thing. They'd laughed at this guy his whole life. Every painting, a punchline. Then this one goes up, and a young poet, Apollinaire, looks at it and says: nobody's going to laugh this year. And nobody did. For once, they saw it straight. Not a punchline. Maybe a man's last dream of the girl he never quite got over.