artifacts and dream

last night, some friends invited my yin and i over for dinner. we enjoyed a delicious vegetarian meal, and i managed to make it through both turnips and Brussels sprouts without (undue) drama. after dinner, we shared a pot of Jasmine tea and began talking about memory...

we privilege the memories tied to artifacts:

pictures,

photograph of meditating frog inside Tupelos World Cafe

journals,

my present journal, start date 21 February 2010

souvenirs,

souvenir given to me by my yin after a trip to the New York IYI

these items take on not only dimension (the surface area they occupy in our mind) but also authority. their weight is unevenly distributed, and our beings bend and flex under the strain of their meaning. their very materiality provides a continuity absent from the moments we merely live and remember.

and yet, we also pass judgment on these artifacts, either magnifying their significance or downplaying their importance by casting dispersions on the people we thought we were when we created them...

perhaps this conversation is what the stage for:

we meditated when we got home, and i felt myself being pulled inward from the moment we stepped inside the door. eyes closed, i heard sounds bleeding together backwards and forwards in time and felt my awareness shifting subtly in unpredictable ways - amorphous, contiguous configurations giving way to cubist energy formations in red.

at the end of the first hour, we heard birds singing preternaturally loud outside our window. it was as if they had wedged their beaks into the cracks between panes in attempt to rouse us, and my yin decided to go to bed.

i stayed another hour, shifting my legs occasionally and pulling a shawl across my shoulders. near the end i felt as if i had to find my way back into my body, as if i was on the brink of slipping away indefinitely. these were only the beginning of the visions, and i half/napped for a half/hour, half/dreaming of the nearfuture.

i saw myself brushing my teeth in the mirror, but chose instead to circumvent the mechanism of time and machinations of fate by going straight to bed, minutes before midnight...

i had strange dreams all night long:

a dream of my yin in a theater, trying to take publicity photos or head shots. nothing is working. the angles are wrong; the colors aren't mixing; the dream shifts to an airplane. it's a small Cessna, not unlike the one from which i jumped on 6 May 2007...

i have a journal that proves it:

journal dated 2007, April 24 - May 19

my yin is waiting to commit suicide, and has sticks of dynamite taped to a baseball bat. she plans to jump out of the plane and then detonate them. after take-off i realize that perhaps the explosion might not kill her, and if so, she would have to wait and fall and dread all the way to the ground. i try to convince her not to jump by telling here these things, but the dream ends imprecisely.

i do not know what time i wake from the sound of her alarm,
so unlike the singing of the birds...