on turning 36

On the night I turned 36
I dreamed of a snowy hillside
on a small country road where my
grandmother once lived. I climbed

until I could go no further and
looked  down to see the Auto-
Nomen waiving from the bottom
of the hill. He motioned

to his left and I turned to find a
set of ropes fastened to the icy
rocks, extending into the blue-
white sky above. I continued

onward without asking why or
how someone I knew so little
would do so much to help me
find my way. I woke

at 4:37 and put my hand on
my wife's stomach to feel
our daughter dancing alone
in the unborn night. I prayed

that I might serve as hemp
and fleece and help her on
her journey and protect her
from the cold.

Confession

I woke this morning a little before 5am from a dream of an unruly meditation group.  In the dream, two of the students from my past life as an adjunct community college professor have found their way into the new age bookstore where the meditation group is meeting.  I attempt to corral their energy in a constructive manner but fail, utterly, and soon find myself asking them to leave the gathering.  As they get up to go, I’m struck by a wave of guilt – is one allowed to expel another under these circumstances if it’s for the good of the whole? Or, is it a sign of failure on the part of the teacher, a mix of impatience, incompetence and frustration?

Whatever it is, I find myself running after them in the dream, stopping them in the parking lot, and telling them they can come back inside if they contribute rather than distract from the teachings. Neither of them respond, and I return to the room.  Something has shifted, however, and the momentum that I had been building has been replaced by doubt.
This may or may not be the point.

[lapse]

I woke again at 6:30, meditated, showered, and made a cup of chai.  At some point I began to journal (a measly, anemic entry that has sadly become par for the course over the past year) and eventually turned on my phone. There was a message from Saylor:

"Drowned Sorrows Dried Up"

We haven’t spoken in months, and other than a couple of unreturned calls in either direction over the winter, we’ve had virtually no contact since last summer when my yin and I spent a couple of nights with him in San Francisco. The call, both in its timing and content, was poignant. Among other things, Saylor mentioned that he has been watching this blog, wondering what had happened.

(here comes the confession)

I don’t know.

I have at least a half dozen reasons, some real, others fictive, but all are ultimately unsatisfying. I’ve thought maybe it’s a result of being too happy, of being unhappy, of working too much, of not working enough, of working too much of the wrong type of job, of being uncomfortable, of being too uncomfortable, blah blah bah…

Do you see what I did there?

The words seem to disappear as effortlessly as they arrive, and over the past year this has been a curious source of disappointment for me. But, with Saylor’s call this morning, and the resultant  realizations I had on the drive into work, I can’t help but think I may have turned a corner, found some pinprick of light through the dark haze that has been obscuring the words for far too long…

Time will tell…

untitled 25

what is the source of these dreams

_d

____e

_____sc

_______end

___________in

______________g

nightly, these sweaty immemories
lingering like dew before sunrise?

i see scenes of seas forgotten
decisions unmade

the ink black turmoil

the subconscious frothing

its way to

 __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________

___________________________the surface_____________________________ _________________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________  ______ __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________  ______ __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________  ______ __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________  ______ __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________  ______ __________  _  _______   _  ___  _________________  _  _____  _  ________ 

etching its way through the dreamscape:

a trail of breadcrumbs

that leaves me hungry

and restless in the morn'

untitled 9

flashes and waves
hours and days
run together (now)
as often as they run
apart. i dreamed
last night of a life

that wasn't. one that might have been if the winds had blown a little more

softly. it was no

different than this one,

except that it wasn't.

Last night's dream and soundtrack

Press play, then continue...

Dream of a giant collegiate cafeteria.  The ages of students range from mid-teens to late-twenties,  and Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" is pulsing over the sound system. I notice first and second-year co-eds moving their hips to the music, unconsciously playing their part in the mating ritual that gives rise to birth that gives rise to death that gives rise to birth that gives rise to...

(whisper, "liberation")

I see them age ten years in the blink of an eye, twenty more in the time it takes to take a deep breath. I see them not as young beautiful bodies, but as old beautiful spirits, trapped inside an aging decaying form...

 (whisper, "nothing")

The food on the buffet is overcooked and lifeless. I search ardently for something that isn't meat, futilely for vegetables that aren't oversteamed and drowning in cheese. In the corner I see my boss, alone at a booth under a stairwell. She is sitting alone with two glasses of red wine, both hers, and a pay telephone on the table. 

(whisper, "awake")

last night's dream

Dream of a parking lot and

unplanned encounter with Nancy

I'm walking down the hill.
It's sloped like the one in the park:

the sky above.

the park dangling in the middle

The town below

falls gently towards the Earth. 

Nancy is getting in her car

| a sports utilitty |

| that barely sque|

|ezes between th|

|e cracked white l

|ines on the aspalt

We're surprised to see each other,
and I nod uneasily as I walk past.

Something has shifted though

and I turn back around.

We exchange a tentative hug and wish each other well.

The trauma has healed. 

The vitriol has dissipated. 

The first six years of the new millennium never happened.

last year's Pyrexed dream of bodhisattvas

One year ago I dreamed of a giant rectangle, subdivided into twenty smaller rectangles. The rectangles were equidistant: four columns across and five rows deep. The proportions of height to width of the smaller rectangles matched the proportion of height to width of the larger rectangle holding them all.

This isn't entirely accurate.

I didn't dream of these rectangles. I dreamed them. In other words, these rectangles were not the content of my dream, but rather its form. Inside the dreaming, each small rectangle would fill with the substance of the dreamscape, and once that individual rectangular cell was full, I would wake from the dream.

This did not make for a restful night's sleep.

The rectangles were made of Pyrex, but I'm uncertain about the substance of the dreamscape. The nature of the dream's movement implies a certain viscosity, but beyond this I know nothing. Likewise I do not know how many cells filled during the night, nor how it is I know there were twenty of them.

One does not count inside the dreaming.

I wonder about the arrangement of cells, and if the gaps between them would have eventually filled if only I had stayed asleep a little longer. I wonder if this dream was a measure of portent or promise.

Upon each waking I considered time and speculated if perhaps it had stopped altogether. It was before sunrise, but it seemed the same distance from sunrise upon each waking. Perhaps the dreams  were separated by mere seconds, but it seemed longer. Maybe the gaps between the rectangles corresponded to the time I spent waking. If this wass the case, then what is the larger rectangle – a diagram of my consciousness itself?

If the large rectangle comprises the extent of my being, then I have come face to face with some clue regarding how much I am sleeping and how much I wake. There was nothing outside the large rectangle, only voidness..,

But what about the border regions? 

It was the waking regions that touched the edges of the large rectangle, not the dream.

Before bed, one year ago, I read a book about various bodhisattva. (How does one pluralize bodhisattva? Bodhisattvas? Bodhisattvi?) Perhaps that had something to do with my dream. Perhaps Avalokiteshvara was trying to tell me something, maybe Shakyamuni is fluent in Pyrex. Perhaps it was a stranger knocking at my door... maybe the stranger is me.

clay statue of Bhairava, seen last summer in New York

dream from the night of the 10th anniversary of 9/11

Dream of an activist being tortured: a battery is brought out, a question is asked, a baseline established.  With the control measures in place, one battery after another is brought out, each larger than the last.  There are four total.  On the top of each battery is a small green LED screen and sets of toggle switches.  The prisoner answers the questions on the screen by toggling the switches up or down.

At the end of each round, invariably, the prisoner has lied and receives a shock.  He screams and convulses, cries and cowers.  The questions are political.  This happens twice.

On the third round, the questions are no longer about political crimes, but rather about the activist's girlfriend - small, insignificant betrayals that she has perpetrated.  Deeds whose doing, even if true, are of no consequence to either the prisoner or to the jailors.  He panics - "How can I know the answers to these questions?" - and after answering them all, perhaps six, a yellow dome light like a miniature police siren flashes, indicating that one of the responses was inaccurate. The jailors tell the prisoner that, if he picks the right one and changes his answer, he can avoid the shock.  

The man chooses correctly; it is over.

But I, the observer of the dream, know that this is the question that has broken the prisoner.  When the pain still trembling through his body recedes, when the fear of future pain has left him, the gravity and true significance of his response will descend upon him sure as the night.

The prisoner goes to the bathroom, taking a small yellow and blue wire from the torture machine with him.  One of the jailors gives him a sideways look, but does nothing.  The observer of the dream wonders if the prisoner intends to kill himself by sticking the wires into the wall outlet in the bathroom...

the drive, the gallery, the night

My yin and I returned to Raleigh yesterday, embarking on another weekend with a friend of mine from high school. More than one year had passed since our last visit.

a window memory, reflection-inflected, an already fading past...

On the drive:

I think of the memories locked inside my bones. I remember the thoughts that once populated my mind with such consistency that they took on the quality of constancy: six forks, five fingers, four evers, three hours, two lovers, one cubic centimeter. I see snatches of glimpses, snatches of glimpses; a red door entrance to a second story bar where Nancy once bought stock in Merck Pharmaceuticals five milligrams at a time.

urban horizon blue meets brick red sky...

In the gallery:

I speak with a docent who has asked us to step away from the art. The exhibit is composed of recycled and repurposed and otherwise disposed of material. I ask her if she appreciates the irony of the situation, how her role as museum employee has interpellated her in a manner contradictory to the impetus underlying the art. She says she does understand, and in the conversation that follows I come to believe her.

I tell her that the museum itself, which is housed in what was once a warehouse, represents a curious phenomenon in post-industrial America. Warehouses – the cultural spaces and physical places of the working class – have grown dark and empty and abandoned over the past thirty years, mirroring the hollowing out of the working class by the creeds of free trade and global capitalism that have come to dominate our ever waking moment.

Once empty, these spaces are filled with art objects and shopping malls and luxury lofts – the symptoms of lopsided wealth and trappings of high culture coming to colonize spaces that were once considered not worth possessing.

tiny concrete death masks of Adam Smith and his progeny...

In the night:

I dream of Nancy. She is coming for a private session with my yin and I try to sneak out the door, knowing the trouble that will follow. Nancy sees me.

Irate.

Spiteful.

Odious.

She is Medusa without feminism

X without Haley

memory without the past.

My yin, though, possesses a strength that runs deeper than the simple violence of malice. She ejects Nancy from the domicile and physically pushes her accomplice out the door.

I wake in a gasp.

Thunder rumbles and I hold my yin closer. "I had a bad dream."

(i imagine)

"Come here," she says. "I'll make it better."

Already, she has.

to be continued...

this year's dream and last

reconstructed dream fragments, 15 July 2011

I dreamed last night in the shape of 10,000 rubber bands bound together into a ball, a three-dimensional circle with nothing in its center. There was my best friend from middle school and people I barely knew from high school. All of them wanted to know why I wasn't with them, and I was unable to explain to them that those times – whatever they were – have long since passed.

This dream segues into (or from, perhaps) another dream of more recent acquaintances and friendships – a place and people to which I will return in six weeks time. There is boredom and waiting and uncertainty. All of us would rather be somewhere else, but we cannot leave until the director of the Center (or was it the Director of the center?) returns.

Only upon waking and writing and typing it all down did I begin to see the similarity of this dream, with its themes of waiting, alienation, and loss of identity, to one I had a year ago:

transcribed on 12 July 2010

Dream of Chris Marker's doppelgånger, working as an Anglican priest in Paris. The imposter goes by the name Aaron Marker, and I go to his church, which is packed with university students and hipsters. To pass the time, I speak to the videographer recording the event.

Time passes.

Eventually the imposter arrives. Something is off. He is far too young, perhaps in his late thirties, and as I listen I grow frustrated. The rains come and most of the students and hipsters leave, hoping to avoid the drenching they deserve.

I stay.

Eventually I speak to the imposter, wondering why he was signing autographs during the service. Why would he – the infamously reluctant model, the famously uncompromising photographer – agree to behavior so banal? I tell him that i'm writing my thesis on him, but the imposter looks mystified.

Time lapses.

Eventually I realize the imposter as such, that he is merely part of an act, an elaborate ruse designed by le Marker verité to deflect his fame. Realizing all this, I begin to disrupt the next service by throwing compact discs at the imposter.

Time passes.

I find myself at a university, questioning the path I've taken, wondering how I will support myself. I run into an acquaintance whom I knew seventeen years ago. He now works as a pharmacist, and I wonder if i should go to medical school.

I know it's too late.

Time lapses.

post-scriptum, 14 July 2010

"The Buddha was not interested in some metaphysical existence,
but in his own body and mind, here and now." - Shunryu Suzuki

for Gaston Bachelard's insomnia

“Our memories are encumbered with facts.
Beyond the recollections we continually hark back to,
we should like to relive our suppressed impressions
and the dreams that made us believe in happiness.”

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I make coffee
and contemplate
the absurdity of sleep:
what hours would be lost
if not for the Dreaming, when
imagination rebels against body and
spirit combats the monotony of slumber.

How does one
express the underlying
subtleties of karma without
resorting to the gross ineptitude of
language? Words always fall short of
the page's empty promise, and so we bathe
in the tepid waters of symptom and pathology.

A high wire
stretches across
the River Lethe from
sophism to naiveté and
a timepiece walks between: fetal
at one end, cadaverous on the other.

Does the second hand ever truly slow? Or
does one merely watch more closely,
finding peace in the suspension
of disbelief and jouissance
in the impatience
of longing?

Gaston Bachelard, sometimes you can judge a man by his beard

notes and variations on Tuesday night's dreams

#1

Dream of a freezing garage with the door cracked open. There is nothing to keep me warm but a toaster oven and a small propane heater. I know the element will soon fail on the toaster, that the fuel will soon be spent on the heater. It is the same garage of my childhood, where our dog Freckles lived in the winter before he ran away. I go outside from time to time to urinate on the tundran ground. No steam rises.

I know the end is near and wonder if this is how Hemingway felt that russet July morning in Idaho. I wonder if I will make it through the night.

Was this the same shotgun?

#2

Dream of a former lover’s wedding. We dated through most of college, and she is alone amongst friends – S___, S____, her mother, etc. Her father is the last in line, and I do not understand why her side is so empty and the groom’s so full. Our parting was my first real lesson in the primacy of timing.

"You have lived many lives," said Krishna to Arjuna. One wonders about the friendships left behind and the reunions scheduled for Austin.

Were these the same people?

#3

Dream of a reunion with a high school friend, a beautiful Asian girl who is happy to see me, but whom I have hurt terribly in the past. Apparently I used her for sex, or broke up with her because she wouldn’t give me sex. I have no recall, however, complete amnesia. I apologize for things I cannot remember, and part of me wonders if they ever happened at all.

Why do we believe our memories? The only authority they carry is that they belong to us, and so often this sense of ownership seems to be the very cause of suffering.

What would it mean to possess memory, eternal and spotless?

#4

A return to my high school campus, walking around and meeting students who now attend. The girl from the previous dream is gone, but there is a music lab. Experiments transpire, and I begin to feel remorse over squandered opportunities. I go up the stairs to a campus comic book store. There are display cases full of Silver Age Captain America and Bronze Age Daredevil with covers drawn by Jim Lee while he was in elementary school.

I imagine how boring and pleasurable it must be to bag and board the old issues each Tuesday before the new shipments arrive; I remember Denver and wonder if I could get a job.

Could I handle the stimuli without falling apart?

#5

Dream of a Subway restaurant or Hungry Howie. I talk shop with the owner, uncertain if I'm still in school or looking for a job. I walk by a trailer home where C___ used to live and consider asking how he is, but I know things have gone downhill.

Ours was another friendship that could not survive the winter, another encounter that lives only in memory and dream.

Can you smell the snow in Boston?

dream, flood, and Amber

3:41am

Dream of a tremendous flood, floating downriver on a half-sinking boat like a scene straight out of Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. There are Winnebagos floating by, and they have miniature steamboat paddle wheels instead of tires. The water level is measured on a giant loading rail of an unseen theater. Perhaps, as a dead Englishman once said, all the world truly is a stage.

As I get further along, it becomes difficult to know whether or not I've passed my destination. The water has devoured the land in a manner worthy of Noah, but one side – the right side – has been touched by Moses, a fifty story drop, sheer as pantyhose, separates the new water level from the old. No riverbank or levy divides the two, but it is not strange in the dream. I merely keep a watchful eye on the water and do my best to keep from falling over the edge, ever vigilant for land...

[lapse]

I woke from this dream sometime in the middle of the night, cradled it in my arms, and fell back asleep. It was still with me at sunrise, and I wrote it down along with a second dream that had to do with my yin purchasing a firearm. Both scenarios seemed equally unlikely, but this is beside the point.

The point is that on the way in to work, NPR told me that there is tremendous flooding along the Mississippi River – so great, in fact, that it rivals the great flood of 1927. This tragedy inspired Faulkner to write the "Old Man" chapters of the novel in my dream, and I learned about it not in a history class, but thanks to this song, which I first heard in the aftermath of Katrina.

I wonder about the dream I had last night and what relation it may have to the flooding a thousand miles from here. Given that my friends and are are (in)famous for our inability to predict even where we will go to lunch, it seems patently absurd to construe myself as some manner of soothsayer, psychic, or oracle.

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that I've been at a music video shoot for going on twelve hours straight, which means I've heard the same three songs upwards of two dozen times each. The act is an up and coming country star – very talented, great voice, writes her own songs, and plenty cute.

Amber Leigh singing "Gypsy Girl"

Last night I even went to bed with one of her songs stuck in my head and woke up with another, equally catchy, song. While this bodes well for her future, it has the opposite implications for my own mental health, and I spent some time this morning repeating mantra just to make it go away. My efforts were in vain though, so I've decided simply to give in to it and allow myself to be washed away by the music like that small raft in the dream...

in praise of Townes Van Zandt (chronology of writer's block on a Saturday afternoon)

2009

There is still:

the editing
the bibliography
the footnotes.

There is still:

a sofa
an altar
a decade
of journals.

Some clothes; a bottle of tamari.

There is a bachelor party and a wedding

but neither of them are mine.

Somewhere in New Jersey a woman is dying.

There are still:

letters of recommendation
an application for a fellowship.

Still:

Al Green is singing.

My sister is writing.

Saylor called to tell me,
Mardou has absconded the city.

But all this is beside the point.

The point is that a girl once told me - in all seriousness - that she didn't know if she wanted to be an artist or a scientist, and therefore she was going to be a firefighter. Apparently the intervening two years have provided her with some clarity because, when I spoke to her yesterday, she told me that she was going to start studying polar animals.

My first thought?

You live in South Florida.

2010

Yesterday i woke up from a dream at 4:37am about swimming in a gray murky lake and being made fun of by a swimming instructor for not being able to swim.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I didn't fall asleep again until after 3:30 last night, and today feels like some odd combination of the last day of school (which it is) and the last day of summer (which it isn't). Part of me wants to sleep, part of me wants coffee. Part of me is already half-dreaming of what will happen tonight after I visit a real mental hospital and imaginary set of conjoined twins:

Evelyn Evelyn

suffice to say that yesterday i felt like i was coming down with writer's block and it didn't feel good and every word i wrote seemed to lead me in the wrong direction and i decided to get rid of all my punctuation and it wasn't until after i had locked myself in an empty classroom that i realized that the wrong direction was really the right direction in the wrong order

I proceeded to reorganize my thoughts and took the following note:

thoughts are memories in the present tense.

I do not know if this is foolish or wise or both, and in the end it does not matter because we are all going to die anyway and who can ever really know about what comes next?

lyres and prophets)

or

(liars and profits?

2011

Apparently I get writer's block this time every April, and I just watched a documentary on this dead Texan:

Townes Van Zandt

It was Mardou that told me about him. It seems years ago. It was years ago. It seems more years than that. I closed the curtains, I watched the film. I'm listening to him now:

I used to play the mouth harp pretty good
hustled up a little dough,
but I got drunk and I woke up rolled
a couple of months ago.

They got my harp and they got my dollar,
them low life so and so's.
Harps cost money and I ain't got it
it's my own fault I suppose.

I have one paper left to write.

I'm sick of words.

Tonight, music.

two years later, one day late

i woke last night at 2:20am, two years ago, and wrote:

a dream, looping, of fragmentation and reunification. am i giving a lecture or is it all in my head? set to a music i know but do not remember.

i do not know
if this dream
was a result of

McLuhan's examination of phonetic literacy

or

Patanjali's examination of the mind

and i
suppose

it really
doesn't
matter.

but i do wonder about that lecture;
i wonder about that music.

what is the nature of
these wisdoms we dream

and forget upon waking?

how many Siddharthas pass in the night?
how many Buddhas are lost in the slumber?

(rabbit rabbit)

a little over two years ago...

The poem below was written a little more than two years ago, and although I didn't know it the night I wrote it, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of my would-be romance. At the time I was engaged in an experiment with celibacy, which taught me many things, but few of them were what I expected. The mind's ability to project inductions and fabricate deductions is truly stunning.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that growth, change, and shifts of consciousness always happen just beyond our ability to see them. The precursors, however, become visible if we practice placing our attention on them. For me this primarily comes through dreams, poetry and meditation.

Unfortunately, waiting for a dream to reveal our next step can lead to a long time waiting (believe me, I've tried), and even when they do arrive interpreting them is a hazy proposition. Poetry is more reliable, but inspiration follows its own timetable – not to mention the dangers inherit in mistaking the muse for the Muse.

not this Muse

That leaves meditation, which is far and away the most reliable source of clarity and wisdom I have yet to discover. (And by 'discover,' I mean stumble into.) One of the interesting things about meditation is that its benefits are realized through practice, not the practitioner's belief of its efficacy. This mean two things.

First, practicing meditation will provide grounding, improve focus, and offer peace of mind even if the practitioner doesn't 'believe' in it. My own experience with mantra and japa mala has taught me this. Second, believing in meditation without practicing is no more useful than believing in reincarnation or the Big Bang or the price of tea in China. For me, although rare, this lack of practice usually results either from a perceived lack of time (inevitably false) or pleasurable distraction (self-explanatory).

image from Godard's Pierrot le fou,
one of my favorite pleasurable distractions

Anyway, a little over two years ago I was doing a hell of a lot of meditating. There were flashing lights and revelations and cosmos-shaking insights, but the true benefits of this practice were beginning to show up in more subtle ways. All the flashing lights in the world don't make a difference if we stay stuck in the same patterns, and what good is an insight if we don't integrate it into the way we live our day-to-day lives?

The poem hinted at this process of integration, which was happening in spite of my mind's best efforts to twist the actual situation around into a story worthy of John Hughes or Lloyd Dobbler:

Cusak did for stalking what Madonna did for Kabbalah

I hold meditation responsible for what happened, and more importantly, for all the things that didn't happen. I could have stayed spinning in that cycle for months or even years longer, delaying – or perhaps even denying – the peace, happiness and fulfillment I now (don't) take for granted. And all because...

I didn't listen

When we met she told me she wanted to be alone.
But I didn’t listen and soon I was in her bed until
one day she said she needed to be alone. But I
didn’t listen and this was repeated many
times until one night she told me that
she didn’t not want to spend the
night with me. I looked around
her room and saw the cat on
the bed, a stack of books
on the nightstand and
I realized the only
thing in her life
saying she
wasn’t
alone
was
me
.

on the 4th day of Christmas

on the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

four boding starts

at three o'clock on the fourth day of Christmas, i was startled awake by a dream of a theater in North Carolina. i worked there as an undergraduate, and in the Dreaming i was mid-return. something about this scenario was disturbing, however, and as i lie in the dark my mind began to fill with questions about the future.

barring unforeseen calamity, i will complete my graduate work five months from now, signaling another of those life junctures where nothing is known, and one finds himself face to face with the enormity of endless possibility. every moment is like this, of course, but rarely do we accept it for what it is: exciting, but also frightening, especially at 3 o'clock in the morning.

rather than allowing my mind to spin in circles, i got up and went to the living room. i took out my mala beads and meditated:

vision of the fragile glass shell of my mind. i find myself trapped inside it, bumping from one side to the other. suddenly, i'm outside of it/ti fo edisni – i am the air filling the room and all that lies beyond.

eventually i grow tired again and go back to bed, but this insomnia and meditation stays with me throughout the day. i rewake at 8am, tend to various chores and meet with my half-Canadian friend mid-morning. i go to my yin's hatha class at noon, and in the afternoon i finally start revisions on the second chapter of my thesis.

a frustrating hour passes.

our weekly meditation group meets that night, and we spend an hour discussing the application of yoga-darsana in our lives, which is a medium-pretentious way of asking:

"do you practice what you preach?"

i talk about the conflation of, and confusion between, meditation in the colloquial sense and meditation in the philosophical sense. the former is more aptly described as a sitting practice, which sometimes (and perhaps atypically) results in the latter (what Patanjali calls as dhyana).

Buddhism (at least Zen variety) seems to outline this delineation more clearly than the yoga practitioners i've known, and in my limited, yet sincere, readings of such texts i have arrived at some understanding of the dangers involved with turning one's meditation practice into a substantial object (which can be possessed) rather than recognizing it as a transient, ephemeral process. put more simply:

one gains no-thing from meditation.

with the mysteries of the universe put to bed for the night, we practiced sitting together, and i had another damn vision, this time of a leaf spinning itself (counterclockwise) into a tight spiral, extending lengthwise towards the sky and the Earth. it had the shape of a elongated seed or pod, and was enveloped by a flame burning all around it. i have a blank canvas in my closet, given to me by Saylor years ago, and as soon as i come into some oil paints i plan to attempt a rendition.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that my yin and i came home and finished watching Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire:

Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina

the film is surreal, comical, and features les belles femmes above playing a single character named Conchita. Fernando Rey plays the male lead, of course, and he attempts to bed Conchita with all the absurd enthusiasm one would expect from Buñuel:

i know how he feels

there are innumerable failed attempts to realize his desire, and the film's French title (Cet obscur objet du désir) literally spells out the need for a Lacanian interpretation of these things. right now, though, with more revisions looming this afternoon, psychoanalysis is the last thing i want to write about. besides, these ideas are illustrated with images more forcefully than could ever be accomplished with words:

this poster is available here

suffice to say that terrorist plots by the "Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus" wreak havoc in the background, and Buñuel has this magical way of allowing the camera to linger in one place just a little longer than necessary, so that Rey's bourgeois nincompoop exits the frame and a second figure (a housekeeper, a gardener, a homeless man) is revealed to be the actual source of labor supporting his opulence.

visions and revisions,
mediation and surrealism –

thus concluded the fourth day of Christmas.

dreaming of someone else's Paris

Last night I dreamed of someone else's Paris,
the torn out pages of a journal: a city less cruel
than the one I saw raining ten years ago.

Atop le tour d'Eiffel, tears turned to ice as they fell
through the overcast January of love's demise
into the patient waiting waters of the Seine below.

No umbrellas are sold in the Parisian winter,
pas de parapluies, pas d'imperméables, pas de cartes:
je pense donc je suis, je suis donc j'aime, j'aime donc je souffre.

No one can tell the rues from the ruse, even in the Paris daytime,
even standing in front of le Métro avec une petite dictionnaire –
je ne comprends rien de cette chose qui s'appelle l'amour.

I don't know why I dreamed of her last night
mais je souhaite qu'elle soit heureuse,
j'espère qu'elle ne rêve pas toujours de moi.

this journal witnessed the day, not the dream, in question
7 November 1999 - 18 January 2000

doppelganger and demi-colons

i slept poorly last night, caught between double-stuffed and half-baked dreams without an Oreo or Ben or Jerry in sight. i cringe reading that – apparently branding and consumption have colonized my vocabulary even more thoroughly than i suspected. David Harvey would probably have something to say about this:



but this is beside the point.

the point is that the first dream, the double-stuffed one, featured not only my yin, but also my yin's doppelganger. i would be hard-pressed to tell you which one (if either) was the real her, but the three of us were in some anonymous hotel room with two double beds, not unlike the one we shared in Gainesville a month ago. one yin was in each, and i was trying to crawl in with either of them.

both were completely unresponsive to my advances.

in the second dream i was presenting at some conference as a guest teacher. an authority figure pulls me from the main meeting hall and takes me outside, telling me that my application was deficient in some way. he has completely misconstrued my writing and intent, but i say nothing, listening quietly before disappearing back to the hotel room.

my yin is not in this one, but the half-baked dream takes the same geographical location as the double-stuffed. part of the perks of this conference include a free teeth cleaning, and i go visit a disinterested dentist housed on campus. he cleans only half of my teeth – the upper left quadrant and the lower right – and i walk out of his office obsessing about the lack of balance in my mouth.

i see little meaning in these dreams, but find their mathematical proportions exceptionally curious. why twice as many? why half as much? is it a response to the pleasantly chilly weather of the past two days? or perhaps because i turned in the second chapter of my thesis last week? i'll be working two jobs on campus next semester, maybe that's it.

maybe it's none of these things. maybe it's random scraps from this lazy week of waiting. maybe it's just the mind's way of finding another way to make two out of one.

2 years (minus) 2 days ago

i've not written in days, owing to a lack of time and unwillingness to get up any earlier. unfortunately 5am has become le temps de réveiller de rigeur, meditating before sunrise and then spending the rest of the day in a combination of teaching and/or writing my thesis. this typically continues until sundown or just beyond, and by the time 10 o'clock rolls around i can barely keep my eyes open. i drift off to sleep seeing the strangest things, like last night's dream of a non-existent African-American Studies department at my university.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that i've turned to the old reliable standby of the over-worked and under-slept: the cop-out. explaining our actions into (or out of) meaning is one of the mind's most well-practiced functions, and it never ceases to amaze me how many ways there are to under/stand a given phenomenon.

man cannot live by excuses alone, however, and so i turn to that stalwart companion of the cop-out: repetition. so, given that my class starts in 16 minutes, and in anticipation of the 15 hour day ahead of me, i (re)present what was happening around this time last year, when my yin and i went to see this man play his guitar:

Conor Oberst, Nebraskan

resolve/crumble

introductions were made;

the backdrop: patch-top anarchist
chatter, comparing flashlights in the dark.

topics: androgyny, honky-tonk,
Omaha hipsters, dreams of David Bowie.

searching
for a label
to name
thi/e/s/e
thing/s.

it seams to remain,
the stitching removed.