puzzledream

the dream is that in the closet are five jigsaw puzzles of the sort that are stamped out of cardboard sheets by a die, rather than cut out of wood by a jigsaw. Actually, of course, there are more puzzles than just the five, but we consider those because of a particular quality they posess, which will be discussed later.

By the pictures on the box lid we can see what the puzzles represent. There is a tulip field in Holland, rising above this an old wooden windmill against an unnaturally blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. There is a night scene of the Manhatten skyline circa 1987, a time that Joe the Archtypical Cabdriver would later recall as a =bad year for New York,= (but pay no attention, it is how he recalls every year aside from the salad days of his Archtypical Brooklyn Childhood). There is a Oriental counterpart to the Occidental windmill, a field of red poppies with tiered pagoda in the background. There are three adorable puppies in a basket, one black, one golden, and one adorably spotted, mottled, and mixed. There is a tartan blanket in the basket which lies on a field of green grass. The final scene is an inconsistently lit interior of some well known cave or the other, a chaos of brightly colored mineral stalagtites sticking tight to the ceiling, stalagmites that might reach the top some day, glares off pools of water, shadowed yellow white expanses of limestone walls.

What is particular about these five puzzles is that someone has dumped all the pieces together into a single box. There is little hope of reliably sorting them by any other method than the construction of all five pictures. This will prove to be a surprisingly difficult and vexing task. Is that the blue of a Chinese or a Dutch sky? Is that bit of black with white specks stars in the night above the skyscrapers, or a glint of sun sparkling off the coat of a labrador pup, or is it a sparkle of water in a deep subterranean pool? The job is complicated by the fact that all five were stamped with the same die, and so each has exactly the same configuration of pieces. Limestone or golden lab?

The puzzles will be solved only as all puzzles are, by sorting out the edges and corners, by making piles of shapes and colors, by scanning chaotic fields of pieces searching for a match. In this case there will be more than the average amount of cursing attempts to =make it fit=. Confusion sets in, mingling concepts with images, a fragment of dark turbid water is thought to be the oily black opium of the poppy fields, a piece of highrise seems to represent all the busy European industry of Dutch commerce, adorable puppy noses all look the same. It is the work of long winter evenings, the worst in recollection, snow past the windows and even the indomitable city plows of Minnesota can't make it out every day. The last bit of windmill, of office window grid, of red poppy, of plaid blanket against wicker, of gleaming green stone, will find their place as the last snows melt into another spring of floods. The balance of disorder in the universe must be maintained.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.