Saturday, January 16, 2010

acrobats, dreaming and King

i'm spending my weekend surrounded by Chinese acrobats, and other than a six hundred bill for take-out, the experience has been rather uneventful in spite of all the juggling, plate spinning, and chair climbing.
but this is beside the point.

the point is that last night i heard the voice of Martin Luther King on the radio as i drove home from work. his articulation and tone were impeccable, and it left me remembering a dream i once had of the Sixties. i once imagined the decade as magical, romancing the notion of a nation that might have been different. i wondered what it would have been like to have been with Kesey in '65, or San Francisco in '67, or Chicago in '68.

over time the veneer separating my romanticism from that of Byron, and as i grew older my dreams grew darker. i fantasized about the the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army. i heard Greenwich Village echoes of March 6th and sang lullabies to Patty in the dark. i watched the year of my birth creep closer and closer until nothing remained.

Nina Simone's voice snapped me back to the present, back to 10:30pm on a Friday night. my yin was waiting for me at home bed, and i dreamed that night of a Balinese god who rolled out its tongue three times - chin, abdomen and floor.

with the final roll, the reality of the dreamscape splintered and i felt myself being swallowed by something i could not comprehend. it was as if every molecule, every atom, every quark collapsed into oblivion, leaving me swimming in the primordial dust of the cosmos. i breathed in the universe and woke the next morning with a hangover, still in the dreamscape, wondering about Arjuna and the vision he was granted by Krishna:


i woke this morning groggy and exhausted. my yin was sleeping beside me and what remained of the dream was little more than a page full of words. i wrote down what i could remember.

i am not an archer, i no nothing of the deities native to Bali, and mine was not a vision of Krishna. but i wondered what was lost in the night... and the taste of sand still lingering in my mouth.

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